Three Oddities: Online Data Findings
January 22, 2010
I have been involved in a project in a land with many consonants. Before heading to the airport, I was catching up on the goodies in my newsreader. Three items caught my attention, and I was surprised by each of them. Let me run down the list.
First, there is the report “US Internet Speed Is on the Decline”. This is a headline sure to catch attention. The only problem is that in my neck of woods, the local cable company continues to offer faster Internet speeds. The report surprised me because when rural Kentucky has zippy speeds, it raises some questions in my mind about methodology. The idea that the US is lagging in certain technology areas is a mini trend.
Second, the article Report: 44% Of Google News Visitors Scan Headlines, Don’t Click Through reported that Outsell (a consulting firm for publishers) conducted a survey of online news users. The finding that stopped me was that 44 percent of those in the sample of about 2,400 did not click to read the full news story. The number strikes me as high. I flip through a newspaper and read one story every two or three pages. Online I read even fewer. The number seems startling judging from the pick up and comments on the story. In our work, we have found more skimming than reading. I look at more short items and read only the longer items that hit one of my interests. My hunch is that I am not alone.
Third, I was surprised to read “Google Nexus One’s First Week of Sales Were Weak, Report Says.” Google is a secretive outfit. Where did these data originate? Flurry. That’s a research firm about which I know little. Google discloses a great deal. There are SEC filings, patent documents, and technical papers that appear in peer reviewed publications. Google cranks out blog content and generates a staggering amount of documentation for its various APIs and some services. I am not sure what “weak” means and I will wait until info from Google turns up in open source info streams.
These three stories are almost ideal for attracting clicks. Are these stories accurate? Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2010
A story written for no dough. Trapped in an airport, I will alert the next uniformed professional whom I see of this sad situation.
Who Buys Business Intelligence?
January 22, 2010
In December 2009, I printed out the write up “Business Intelligence (BI) Procurement Survey Results”. I am not into business intelligence, but I am interested in information about the procurement of enterprise software and systems. I read this document on the flight to Detroit earlier this week, and I noted several factoids or semi factoids that struck me as important.
The article appeared in a blog produced by MAIA Intelligence:
a company committed to developing and continually improving powerful Business Intelligence reporting and analysis products to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers. We serve each of our clients with integrity. No single client is more important than our professional reputation.
I profiled MAIA Intelligence for a client a couple of years ago, and it is clear that the firm has invested some money in its Web site and its information outreach activities. Like most surveys, there is not much data about the size of the sample, the methodology for selecting the sample, margin of error, and the other stuff that annoys first year statistics students.
Nevertheless, here are the items that I circled on my hard copy:
- Marketing, finance, and senior executives are the folks who are the top dogs when it comes to business intelligence. Information technology folks don’t care too much.
- The person who says “yes” or “no” to a business intelligence purchase is usually a C level executive. This horrible convention for referring to top management means that a person who is in charge makes the decision.
- The typical business intelligence purchase takes less than six months. In short, the cost of the sale is going to be high from follow ups, handholding, and the negotiation process
- Those in this sample reported that an in house installation was the preferred approach.
You can review the survey results and pluck your own gems from the write up. I am wondering how long it will take for business intelligence companies to shift their clients to a hosted or cloud based solution. The bottleneck for business intelligence is getting custom queries into the system. With search vendors starting to offer business intelligence solutions, will this trend have a material impact on the business intelligence world. IBM owns a number of business intelligence properties, and there are bunch of small and mid sized firms in the space. The Google has some interesting capabilities in this area as well.
My conclusion is that I am not sure that I know what “business intelligence” means. It is like “enterprise search”: confusing, fragmented, and capable of supporting conflicting claims that a potential buyer has a tough time interpreting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Okay, another free post. I will report this sad fact to one of the agencies responsible for intelligence. They have a need to know.
Business Intelligence Resources
January 22, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Business Intelligence Resources on the Internet” by Marcus P. Zillman. Mr. Zillman publishes a number of free and for-fee reports. This particular document is available from a direct link in Mr. Zillman’s Web log. I also located a link on Mr. Zillman’s Business Intelligence Resources. If you are a fan of lists of links, you will want to snag this document. I noticed a number of different urls, and a search on the Google provides a large number of hits to Mr. Zillman’s research efforts.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2010
A freebie. I must report this to the Senate’s library manager. Intelligence is the main focus of the elected officials in this august body.
Information Builders WebFOCUS Magnify
January 22, 2010
I wrote about Information Builders in my report for the Gilbane Group a couple of years ago. I was updating my files, and I wanted to pass along a bit of information about this product. Information Builders is a vendor of enterprise solutions. The company spans data management, business intelligence, and dashboards. You can get basic information about the firm’s products on the firm’s Web site. There are some diagrams showing how Information Builders’ software “snaps in” to most enterprise computing infrastructures.
Information Builders rolled out more than 100 changes to its WebFOCUS product line. According to TDWI, there have changes to the dashboard and the predictive analytics. For search, TDWI says:
“WebFOCUS Magnifyƒz a search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities, has been updated with new features designed to enhance both usability and security. Highlights include:
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- Collections, enabling users to select a collection that narrows their search to a specific part of the index, prior to their submission
- Magnify iWay Wizard, helping users to quickly set up a Magnify environment, instructing them how to handle each field when transforming a record into a search result
- New security features including single sign-on integration, multiple credential support, the ability to hide entire results and parts of results, and present alternate-result rendering as well as a security API”.
The search product indexes content, using what the company calls “real-time transactional indexing method”. The results list provides relevance ranked output plus facets to allow point and click navigation. The screenshot below shows one possible results display. The system is fully customizable, so you can create the look and feel you want.
If you are an Information Builders’ customer running the company’s business intelligence system, the search system (WebFOCUS Magnify) integrates with that Information Builders’ product. The company says:
A user’s inquiry does not end with search results. Those results will often lead to new questions, which, in order to be answered, require numbers analysis, aggregations, and value comparisons that can only be achieved through business intelligence. For example, a search for a bank account may lead the user to want to know more about its cash flow patterns, expenditures by time frame, and other transactions. Magnify allows a user to drill down directly from search results into the reporting system, so any natural language search can be instantly expanded to include numbers analysis. Search terms are fed to the WebFOCUS platform as parameters that automatically trigger the generation of reports or guided ad hoc forms that can be used to further refine report content.
The company added support for Web content three or four years ago. You can read about this aspect of WebFOCUS in “Information Builders Google-izes BI.” The company has been surfing on Google for a couple of years. You can get an overview of Information Builders’ Google components on the Google Solutions Marketplace.
I have never been able to get a firm grip on the Information Builders’ pricing for its search and content processing technology. I did learn that the WebFOCUS Intelligent Search component for the Google OneBox for Enterprise is free. You can learn more about this product from the Google Solutions Marketplace. You can read about this “surf on Google” play in the March 2006 Computer World article “Information builders, Google Build Corporate BI Search Tool.” I just haven’t heard much about the success of this software component.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2010
Okay, here’s the scoop. A freebie. I will report this to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an outfit that combines work and data analysis. That’s the oversight group for me.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Pricing
January 22, 2010
Short honk: I was fooling around with the updates to my dataset of search and content processing vendors. I came across a note to myself about Oracle Secure Enterprise Search pricing. I neglected to put this information in this Web log, allegedly the repository of information I want to remember. Silly goose! If you want to snag a copy of OSES 10g as the product is labeled, you can find that a perpetual license is $34,500 per processor. What’s not clear to me is if a quad core chip is on a single die, does that die constitute a single processor fee of $34,500 or will a single quad core processor trigger a license fee of $34,500 * 4 or $138,000? I looked around for an answer, but I did not land upon that detail. First year support costs $7,590. So a dual quad core machine and a fail over system costs either $69,000 or $276,000 plus support. I located the pricing information on the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search page.
The description of the product which seems to be 10g is:
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) is a standalone product that allows you to find relevant documents faster in your information repositories. It crawls, indexes and makes your corporate intranet searchable through a Web-style search. It organizes content from multiple repositories by extracting valuable metadata that can be used in portal application, provides effective search with the best relevance ranking in the industry – and finds what you want. It eliminates the need for coding against hard-to-use low-level APIs. It provides the best database integration and most secure search in the industry and includes:
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- The ability to search and locate public, private and shared content across intranet web content, databases, local disk or file servers, IMAP email, document repositories, applications, and portals
- Excellent search quality, with the most relevant items for a query spanning diverse sources being shown first
- Sub-second query performance
- Highly secure crawling, indexing, and searching
- Integration with Desktop Search tools
- Ease of use, administration and maintenance
If you are an Oracle DBA, OSES makes sense. But if you are a penny pinching CFO, you might want to compare the Oracle perpetual license fee with other vendors’ products. You can keep tabs on Oracle search news at the Overflight page on ArnoldIT.com. Lots of tweets about Oracle, but not much hard news. I wonder why.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
A freebie. No one at Oracle paid me to write this pricing item, nor did I get any money to omit pointing out that the Oracle flagship database is at Version 11 and OSES is at 10. I will report this to the Oracle users in the Old Executive Office Building where some financial types work, often late at night.
Attensity Goes for Mobile
January 21, 2010
I saw the headline “Attensity Announces New Mobile Features for Attensity Analyze for VOC”. VOC means voice of the customer. The acronym is gaining popularity as a synonym for customer support. As you know, customer support sounds so darned good and so easy to say when giving a sales pitch. But when you buy a gizmo and have a question, customer support is almost as bad as having a kidney stone when you are having a root canal. I find the “your call will be recorded for quality purposes” one of the most memorable pieces of disinformation I have encountered. When one gets to a person, I find that the individual reads a script and often does not listen to my question.
I lost a bank ATM card whilst undergoing a security check at Boston Logan airport on January 6, 2010. When I arrived in Philadelphia, I discovered that my bank ATM card, a gift card for a book store, and a handful of business cards were missing. I called my bank and requested that the card be “killed”. I was rushing to a connecting flight, and the bank reluctantly agreed to “kill” the card but only after I agreed to a $10 service charge, providing my social security number twice, my address twice, and verification via a “yes” or a “no” that I had an account at the bank. That made a wonderful impression on me because I don’t think there are too many people who knew the card number, my social security number, my bank account number, and my middle name. The institution? Ah, the fraction bank, Fifth Third.
Customer support, therefore, raises some sunken baggage, and I think the VOC acronym is designed to dance around the connotations of customer support. Well, I learn quickly, so this news story is about customer support. Attensity, according to the news item,
announced new mobile functionality for its award-winning Attensity Analyze for VOC. … Attensity Analyze for VOC offers users deeper capabilities for understanding and acting on customer feedback.
The story continued:
The new mobile functionality for Attensity Analyze for VOC enables users of mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone, the Verizon Droid, and the Google Nexus One to analyze Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback across a variety of customer conversation channels including emails, CRM notes, survey responses and social media. Users can select any of their Attensity Analyze dashboards and switch between various views from any mobile device. Interactive drill-downs allow for deep exploration of data, while automatic issues and topic alerts allow customer service professionals and executives to be alerted in near-real time to potential crises or issues with their company or their competitor’s products.
If you are struggling with your own organization’s customer support demons, you may want to check out the Attensity offering. Sounds really good. Just like an executive’s promise that his / her company provides customer support.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Oyez, oyez, oyez. (I think I needed three oyezs to check out Google deduplication method revealed in US6658423.) I received no dough for this write up. I will report this sad fact to the Federal Reserve Bank in St Louis, a publisher of economic research on many topics often unrelated to monetary policy.
Bitext and NaturalFinder: Breathes Life into Legacy Search Systems
January 21, 2010
In December 2009, the managing director of Bitext, a Madrid-based software development company, bought me a hamburger. As we poked at London’s version of a Whopper, I learned that Bitext had developed a way to take a not-so-useful legacy search system and give it new life. I thought the idea was a good one because many organizations do not have the money, time, or information technology expertise to do a “rip and replace” solution to their search woes.
What does Bitext offer?
The product is called NaturalFinder. Bitext’s new language technologies make it possible to enrich a user’s queries with linguistic knowledge. The system has emerged in the international market after being implemented in the Spanish national railroad and a number of commercial enterprises.
Users of enterprise search systems have to hit on the exact combination of key words to get the information needed to answer a business question. This takes time and, according to the company’s CEO, Antonio Valderrabanos, “inefficient searching costs companies money. We developed NaturalFinder to take the rough edges off existing enterprise search solutions. We have a search turbo charger which really delivers.”
I told Bitext that research reports from Net Strategy (Paris), the Association of Image and Information Management (USA), and my team here at ArnoldIT.com (USA) say one thing: users want systems that deliver needed information without trial and error.
“With companies asking employees to do more, guessing the secret word combination to unlock the treasure chest of corporate affronting is no longer acceptable. Bitext allows the user to key a word and our technology understands the meanings and displays suggested results. A single click takes the user to results that what the user intended,” Mr. Valderrabanos told me.
The Bitext system uses a range of linguistic technologies, including word stemming, synonyms, and homonyms, among others. These technologies are invisible to the user. Once a query is entered into a search system equipped with the Bitext software, that search system generates rich metadata such as names, concepts, and events.
The system does the work for the user. The result is, “quicker searches with no training and no system slowdown”, according to Mr. Valderrabanos. “One of the technical innovations is that the Bitext NaturalFinder technology requires no changes to an organization’s existing search system. It is load and go.”
After I finished my burger, I got a full demo of the new system. I told Mr. Valderrabanos:
In my opinion, your Bitext system is one of the first search enhancements that work out of the box. The Google Search Appliance gains greater utility without the time and complexity of coding a customized software widget. Bitext has broken new ground with NaturalFinder.
Bitext has engineered its system to work with Microsoft SharePoint Server, the Google Search Appliance, Oracle Text Search, Autonomy, Endeca, and legacy Fast ESP installations. The system enhances the utility of Lucene and other open source search solutions.
NaturalFinder supports English, French, and Spanish, as well as other languages. Bitext’s engineers can develop customized applications for customers who have special requirements such as those of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Bitext was founded in 2007 by experts in linguistics and based in Europe. The company is focused on making natural language text meaningful for computers. In addition, Bitext develops linguistic technology (dictionaries, grammars and ontologies) for OEM integration with any third-party application: from search to sentiment analysis, contextual advertising, spam filters, business intelligence, etc.
You can get more information about Bitext at www.bitext.com
Stephen E. Arnold, January 20, 2010
As I pointed out, I received a hamburger and a demonstration. I wish to disclose this to the FDA to make clear that the addled goose will sit through a demo as long as he is fed a quasi-Whopper. Alas! I received no cash. Oh, I got fries.
Mainframe Hot Again: Really?
January 21, 2010
I like mainframes. My first content project was completed on one of these svelte—well, maybe that is not the best way to describe—IBM installations. A mainframe when I started fooling around in air conditioned rooms was an complex of hardware, software, cables, and assorted other components. If you wanted to get your class project or a bit of side work done quickly, you learned to work in the “computer center”. None of that waiting in a queue for a key punch machine (anyone remember those?) or for some 17 year old person with thick glasses like moi to put your cards in the processing queue. Nope. Work in the computer center, make some money, and get your work done without meatware latency.
I have written about mainframe in this Web log. Most of the write ups have been in response to IBM public relations and marketing. Now, I surmise, the IBM marketing machine has sent enough signals so that the sensitive antennae of The Economist editorial staff has reacted.
The article that caught my attention is “The Return of the Mainframe: Back in Fashion.” The sub title is, “The mother of all computers no longer looks that old.” The hook for the story is that the Bank of Namibia is getting its first mainframe. Obviously Namibia is proud to be on the bleeding edge of information technology, right out there with Hitachi (er, no), PSI (er, acquired by IBM), T3 (er, in the migration to distributed computing business), and I suppose you can argue that Dell, HP, and Sun, among others are in the “sort of” mainframe business.
I recall reading the 2005 news item that described the mainframe as “a falling star”. If you are not familiar with what’s inside a mainframe installation, check out the specs for various systems on the Tech News site.
The Economist said that mainframes are now distributed systems. I wonder if that means “like Google”? What the Economist told me was:
High “switching costs” explain in large part why mainframes are still a good business for IBM. It is the only big firm left selling them, at prices that start at $100,000 but often reach the millions. Sales of mainframes are said to have brought in about $3.5 billion a year, on average, in the past decade. Although this is only about 3.5% of the firm’s overall revenue, each dollar spent on hardware pulls in at least as much from sales of software and maintenance contracts. Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research estimates that 40% of IBM’s profits are mainframe-related.
Ah, annuity and replacement revenue! I also like “high switching costs”. That is on the money. The reason the Namibia deal is “news” is that I assume it is one of those “emerging markets” that needs a mainframe. Next time I visit Namibia, maybe I will get a chance to see what the country bought?
In my opinion, the killer passage in the Economist story was this one:
More worrying to IBM is a run-in with Neon, a software company. It sells a program that allows computing tasks that usually run on a mainframe’s regular processors to be shifted to the discounted ones meant to run things like Linux. Predictably, IBM is not happy and is said to have threatened to charge higher licensing fees to customers using Neon’s software. This, in turn, has led Neon to file a lawsuit against IBM. Defeat would make a big dent in IBM’s mainframe revenues. Still, the computer industry seems to be moving IBM’s way. The mainframe may well find a new home in corporate computing clouds, the pools of data-processing capacity many firms are building. Many companies are also increasingly interested in buying simpler, more integrated computer systems, even if this means a higher price. Reacting to this, IBM’s rivals are making bets on mainframe-like products. On January 13th HP and Microsoft announced a pact to come up with tight packages of hardware and software. Brad Day of Forrester Research, another market-research group, puts it thus: “We are on the way back to the future.”
Quite a conclusion because IBM has responded to competitors in the mainframe sector by treating them to some of that Big Blue kindness. PSI was bought by IBM. T3 probably has its own view of how IBM has encouraged its business.
The impact of the story on me was:
- IBM is hustling mainframes because it is good money for services
- The marketing muscle of IBM is obvious to me
- The health of the mainframe “industry” is accomplished by shifting the definition of a mainframe to the more fuzzy distributed computing approach
Will I buy a mainframe? Nope. Here’s why:
- IBM hardware is over engineered and designed to create a demand for an IBM trained specialist to perform even basic fixes. FRU means an expensive tech roll and on site charges.
- A mainframe demands an ecosystem of specialists. When that ecosystem is not in place as it is at ArnoldIT.com, then you get to pay folks like ArnoldIT.com to work on mainframe projects. Linux is some help but in other ways, Linux is not the magic wand or part of the magic wand
- There are easier and cheaper ways to accomplish certain computing tasks
- A huge complex called a mainframe that runs Linux is a bit like putting a submarine’s nuclear power generation unit in my garage to generate electricity for my home. Interesting in a theoretical sort of way but otherwise pretty darned crazy.
I think it is super that an emerging market can afford a mainframe, but there may be other ways to provide the computing horsepower required. I am more impressed with the power of the IBM marketing machine.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2010
No one paid me to point out that IBM has marketing muscle. I will report this to the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce.
Quintura Nets Interface Patent
January 21, 2010
Quintura Inc. received a patent in December 2009 for a “Search Engine Graphical Interface Using Maps of Search Terms and Images.” You can obtain a copy of US7,627,582, from the outstanding online service available for the USPTO. If that system is a little sluggish, a number of other patent document services are available. This invention by Alexander V. Ershov concerns:
A system, method and computer program product for visualization of search results includes a map displayed to a user on a screen. The map shows search query terms and optionally other terms related to the search query terms. The display of the terms corresponds to relationship between the terms. A graphical image is displayed next to at least one of the search query terms. The graphical image is associated with a URL that corresponds to a search result. The graphical image is a favorite icon that is derived from the HTML script associated with a webpage at the URL, or an animated image, or a video, or a cycling GIF. A plurality of graphical images can be displayed in proximity to the search query term. The graphical image can be a logo or a paid advertisement. A plurality of graphical images are offered for sale in association with the query search term, and a size and/or placement of each graphical image corresponds to a price paid by each purchaser, or multiple images can be displayed at the same location on the screen, and a duration of display of each graphical image corresponds to a price paid by each purchaser.
Quintura’s see and find technology replaces the laundry list approach to a user’s query. Here’s an example of a Quintura search result:
In addition to suggested queries, the interface provides the user with a tag cloud, which can be quite helpful for many users. I am no patent attorney, but there may be some legal eagle-type conversations about other firms’ use of the system and method set forth in US7,627,582. You can get more information about Quintura from the firm’s Web site at www.quintura.com. I wrote about this company in September 2009.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Oyez, oyez, a freebie. No one offered a single bent penny to write this short item. Alas! I shall report non payment to the Department of Commerce, an entity of repute.
Hiding from Google
January 20, 2010
Perched in a train station, I have a tough time surfing the hot search and content processing news. I was able to connect to an article in Forbes Magazine called “How to Hide from Google.” I find write ups in business magazines that describe proxies and the onion router mildly amusing. What struck me, however, was not the comment that TOR exhibited latency or the omission of other methods for ensuring that various tracking objects can be deleted from a user’s system. No. What I liked was the juxtaposition of advertisements on the Web page. Here’s what I see on my browser on January 20, 2010:
I noticed two advertisements for Microsoft. The first, visible even in the tiny WordPress thumbnail is the MSFT logo opposite the title and a second ad in the outside right column. When I looked at this, I asked myself, “Who is sponsoring this anti Google advertisement?” I did not see a China logo. So it can’t be those chirpy folks to the East. I did not see an Apple logo, maker of laptops much beloved by the Mountain View marketers. I did see two Microsoft logos, however. Interesting in the view of the addled goose. The sponsored by Microsoft tag suggests an advertorial to me, but how can this be in a business magazine?
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2010
I wish to disclose that no one, friend or fowl, paid me to point out this interesting juxtaposition of Google and Microsoft content. I am in frosty Europe, sort of in between jurisdictions. I will report this free write up to the first person with a uniform I see in the train station in Germany.
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