Iron Mountain Magnetic Again?
September 26, 2010
Iron Mountain is an unusual company. The firm’s business is built on moving paper from a file cabinet to a secure location. Put those documents in a box and store them in a cave, an “iron mountain”. From paper, the company moved to digital content and entered the digital archiving business. Along the way, the firm snapped up Purple Yogi (now known as Stratify). Purple Yogi was an early “automated classification” and search system for content. The Purple Yogi folks had an interesting approach, but like many of the early “automatic” systems, humans were needed. As a result, dealing with “big data” was not the system’s core competency. Purple Yogi morphed into Stratify and focused on the legal market where the content domains were bounded and billable human labor was part of the business model. Iron Mountain acquired Stratify (né Purple Yogi) in 2007 as I recall. then in a somewhat surprise move to the goose, Iron Mountain acquire Mimosa Systems, another document processing outfit. According to the Iron Mountain news release:
The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for email, SharePoint data and files, and gives the company an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives. The ability to archive and manage data both onsite, inside the customer’s firewall, and remotely in the cloud makes Iron Mountain a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management. It also provides the company’s customers with greater flexibility and choice for managing their information. Additionally, the company can now capture and manage a broader range of enterprise information from so-called “edge-of-the-network” devices like desktop PCs and laptops as well as from company repositories like email stores, SharePoint servers and file systems. Many larger businesses still prefer to keep this data on their premises today. Finally, the acquisition allows Iron Mountain to extract intelligence from the information it manages both on-premises and in the cloud, advancing the company’s larger strategy to help enterprises lower the costs and risks associated with storing and managing information.
The search and content processing company has quite a few players. My experience is that most of today’s search wizards wearing their azurini T shirts and selling their advice to search-challenged procurement teams don’t know much about Purple Yogi or Mimosa.
The reason is that specialist firms deliver narrow solutions to segments of the market too small or esoteric to trigger a reading on the English majors’ Geiger counters.
Upon reading “Are Iron Mountain Shares Ready to Climb?”, I asked, “What’s the PR push all about?” The link to the story is likely to go dead because the source is Barron’s, a Murdoch property so you may have to pay to see the info when you read this post.
The reason for the “excitement” about Iron Mountain is that Iron Mountain’s share price has not exactly set the “recession is over” world on fire. Nevertheless, Warren Buffet likes the stock and that’s enough for Barron’s. Toss in the promise that Iron Mountain will win big in the cloud computing space, and you have a PR opportunity.
Barron’s notes that Iron Mountain has some challenges. These include management policies, a revenue base built on paper documents, and lots of competition.
My view is different. I think Iron Mountain is a company that can generate a hefty return with a shift in management focus and a rebuild of its core technical approach. I think that buying companies like Stratify and Mimosa do not solve problems; they create more problems. Without a more robust technical vision, Iron Mountain is not likely to have the magnetic pull that savvy folks like Warren Buffet require. Therefore, if Mr. Buffet wants to make a killing, he is going to have to make slow, methodical changes that first affect management and then technology. Without these shifts, Iron Mountain is going to have some difficulty dealing with the Amazon-type or Rackspace-type of approach. A Yahoo or Google style approach to next generation technology will be tough to make work. How patient is Mr. Buffet?
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
Freebie
TEMIS and Its Luxid Toolbar
September 26, 2010
A reader in Europe alerted us to the new Luxid Toolbar. TEMIS, which assets that it is the leading provider of text analytics solutions for the enterprise, offers a free LuxidBar. You can get the software from www.temis.com. According to Tagline, the TEMIS Web log:
The publicly available LuxidBar connects to a Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform hosted and maintained by TEMIS in the cloud. The platform performs a broad range of business and scientific entities extractions together with their semantic relationships.
The company say that the software “inserts smart links on the fly within the text” and “displays information analytics dynamically.”
The add in reminds us of some of the functionality available to users of the Inxight system before the company was acquired by Business Objects, which in turn was acquired by SAP.
TEMIS says, “This unique Internet browser sidebar accelerates Web page and document reading and connects users to related knowledge.” There is a stampede for this type of value adding in content processing. Other firms in the race include i2 Ltd. (which is not chasing the consumer market after 20 years of labor in this particular vineyard), Palantir (a company involved in what seems to be a tar pit related to its content refining methods technologies), JackBe (a former government centric outfit now probing the enterprise mashup market), and dozens of other companies moving from the intelligence market to the commercial market as funds in war fighting get redirected.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
Freebie
Google, Red Herring, and Damage Control
September 26, 2010
I found the story “Eric Schmidt: Forget Apple, Facebook, Bing’s Our Biggest Problem” quite interesting. The basic idea for the story was a statement attributed to Google’s top boss. The passage that caught my attention was:
“Bing is a well run, highly competitive search engine,” Schmidt tells the WSJ’s Alan Murray in a long interview. Meanwhile, it’s “too early to tell,” how big a competitor Facebook will be, he says. Apple is, “the extreme expression of a closed system, but also a partner.” While Bing is going right after Google’s core business, we think Apple and Facebook are long term threats. Each of those companies are fighting for the next big thing. Bing is fighting the war Google won last decade.
Several thought struck me. First, Google really needs Bing to gain market share. With the skies above Shoreline Drive dark with legal eagles, a competitor will make clear that Google is not a monopoly. My own poking around suggests that the usage reports spit out by the azurini understate Google’s dominance of Web traffic. The praise for Bing, therefore, has less to do with the excellence of the Microsoft system and more about the need to pump that baby up.
Second, I think the Apple situation is a pretty big and serious deal. Google’s present tactical approach seems to be heavily influenced by Apple’s earlier actions. In fact, I find the lock step actions fascinating. The problem is that Google has not been able to respond to the profitable construct Apple has in place. Is Google investing in the mobile market in order to gain market share? If so, this tactic is a longer term one. Apple has time to expand its rich media position. Like it or not, Google has not yet responded to the hardware/software ecosystem Apple has in place. So Google is, it seems to me, emulating Apple just with a lag time between an Apple action and a Google response. Otherwise, Google is in the me too game. Is that enough to make Android pump cash at a time when online ad sales may be getting tired?
Third, the Facebook thing is a really big deal. I am not a social goose. Math Club people are not going to win seats on the Student Council without some serious pizza ploys. Facebook continues to chug along, and it is now spawning a rich, weird ecosystem that has become a “curation resource”; that is, you can trust Facebook believe it or not. I know “trust” and “Facebook” are not like peanut butter and jelly but the idea is that friends offer better info than a search engine with mystery methods.
My hunch is that Google and its top brass recognize these forces: legal hassles, ad purchasing behavior, the need for revenues from a hardware/software ecosystem, and the crazy “friend” revolution.
Google has no answers as I write this to these modest hurdles. So what concerns the Googlers? Bing.com.
There you go.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
Freebie
Is Google Becoming Yahoo in Display Ad Methods?
September 25, 2010
Short honk: A reader sent me a link to this Web page in the September 13, 2010, BrandWeek. The reader thought I would be interested in very big multimedia “Yahoo type” of ad from the Semel era. I am not, but I wanted to document this escalation of Google’s messaging. After more than a decade, a large ad wants attention. Does this mean that revenues from other Google initiatives is not flowing at the desired rate? Is the basic ad system losing its 2004 to 2008 traction? I don’t know because I am not in the ad, PR, or sales game like the pros at BrandWeek. “Display advertising is transforming rapidly, and is at a critical inflection point”, the ad says. I don’t know if this statement is accurate, but it seems to be a footnote to “Display ads are big. They’re gonna be huge”. The links are to YouTube videos, and I am not really a video person. The contact us displays a Google form, and I have a hunch that a Googler will respond if you fill in the required “lead” data here. No link to a search box, however. Another interesting tweak in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
Freebie
Tweets with Pickles: DataSift and Its Real Time Recipe
September 25, 2010
We have used Tweetmeme.com to see what Twitter users are doing right now. The buzz word real time has usurped “right now” but that’s the magic of folks born between 1968 and 1978.
DataSift combines some nifty plumbing with an original scripting language for filtering 800 tweets a second. The system can ingest and filter other types of content, but as a Twitter partner, DataSift is in the Twitterspace at the moment.
Listio describes the service this way:
DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday. Tune tweets through a graphical interface or through its bespoke programming language. Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP. Comment upon and rank streams created by the community. Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams.
The idea is that a user will be able to create a filter that plucks content, patterns like Social Security Numbers, and metadata like the handle, geographic data, and the like. With these items, the system generates a tweet stream that matches the parameters of the filter. The language is called “Filtered Stream Definition Language” and you can see an example of its lingo below:
RULE “33e3891a3aebad56f962bb5e7ae4dc94” AND twitter.user.followers_count > 1000
A full explanation of the syntax appears in the story “FSDL”.
You can find an example on the DataSift blog which is more accessible than the videos and third party write ups about a service that is still mostly under wraps.
The wordsmiths never rest. Since I learned about DataSift, the service has morphed into “cloud event processing.” As an phrase for Google indexing, this one is top notch. In terms of obfuscating the filter, storage, and analysis aspect of DataSift, I don’t really like cloud event processing or the acronym CEP. Once again, I am in the minority.
The system’s storage component is called “pickles.” The filters can cope with irrelevant hash tags and deal with such Twitter variables as name, language, location, profiles, and followers, among others. There are geospatial tricks so one can specify a radius around a location or string together multiple locations and get tweets from people close to bankrupt Blockbuster stores in Los Angeles.
The system is what I call a next generation content processing service. Perched in the cloud, DataSift deals with the content flowing through the system. To build an archive, the filtered outputs have to be written to a storage service like Pickles. Once stored, clever users can slice and dice the data to squeeze gems from the tweet stream.
The service seems on track to become available in October or November 2010. A graphical interface is on tap, a step that most next generation content processing systems have to make. No one wants to deal with an end user who can set up his own outputs and make fine decisions based on a statistically-challenged view of his or her handiwork.
For more information point your browser at www.datasift.net.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2010
Lexalytics Finds Meaning in :-) and LOL
September 25, 2010
We received a news release from Lexalytics. “Lexalytics Unveils Sentiment Analysis of Emoticons, Acronyms; First OEM Engine to Examine Short Form Content for Sentiment Analysis” reveals that the vendor processes non-text emoticons such as :-0. We think this is a good use of available message cues in a short text message. According to the news release:
With the use of emoticons, abbreviations, and confusing “social speak” grammar, micro-blog services such as Twitter present a difficult task for natural language processing systems. These improvements come as part of the yearly software license for Salience, Lexalytics’ core text analytics engine.
Police, intelligence agencies, and Madison Avenue types are likely to give the new capabilities a spin. Will non-text characters illuminate terse, sometimes tokenized messages? We will keep our ear to the ground.
Interesting idea. One question: Has Lexalytics made a breakthrough no other vendor can emulate with a look up table? Do we process messages with these types of content payloads? Not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2010
Xoogler Nips Googlers on Value
September 24, 2010
I read “Gmail Creator: Facebook Has the Potential to Be Worth More Than Google” and thought “Wow.” If memory serves me, Mr. Buchheit, the Xoogler, allegedly coined the “Don’t be evil” catchphrase. If true, Mr. Buchheit certainly has a knack for putting words that matter on a needle and shoving it through the fabric of the Web.
Here’s what TechCrunch said in its remarkable story:
Buchheit is an angel investor and co-founder of FriendFeed, the social aggregation and conversation service that Facebook acquired last year (he now works at Facebook doing well, something). But he’s perhaps best known as the key person behind the creation of Gmail for Google. He also had a hand in the creation of AdSense/AdWords as well — you know, the way Google makes all their money. Point is, when he compares Facebook to Google, it’s worth listening to. And that’s exactly what he did a couple days ago on Quora. “I believe many people were (and still are) significantly undervaluing Facebook equity. It has the potential to be worth more than Google,” Buchheit wrote
.
Set aside the actual value of Facebook. Ignore the big numbers implicit in the billions bandied about. The point for me is that Mr. Buchheit has pointed out something that I have sensed since mid 2008. The Google rocket ship may be struggling against gravity. Facebook, as Mr. Buchheit’s comment makes clear to me, is not hampered by the same forces that tug on the Google vehicle. Mr. Buchheit seems to me to be giving voice to an aspect of Google I don’t hear much about, albeit in an interesting way via Quora.
Search has huge capital costs and the ad sales system has made massive investments easy to digest. Google continues to get caught in pesky nation states’ idea of what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. The most recent example is the issue Google has with the Czech Republic.
Facebook stumbles but seems to be able to regain its balance, continue to attract high powered employees, and achieve the kind of visibility that once was Google’s alone.
Now, who should do no evil? A Xoogler at Facebook with a wordsmithing knack?
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
Freebie
SAP Gets Agile like an Aging Quarterback
September 24, 2010
A year round exercise program and a grueling pre season warm up can put bounce in an aging athlete’s step. SAP is back, buying companies and making waves in the enterprise software sector. The company’s most recent announcement caught the attention of Computerworld. The story “SAP Rolls Out Wave of ‘Rapid Deployment’ Apps” explains that “relationship management modules” can be up and running in as little as three months. Yep, the 40 yard time for an aging athlete is about that when racing against a 23 year old.
One of the more interesting comments in the story was, in my opinion, this passage:
SAP’s announcement is the latest effort by the vendor to shed its image as a provider of monolithic, difficult-to-maintain ERP systems. In recent years it has rolled out a series of “enhancement packs” that help customers of its flagship Business Suite add significant new features without the pain of a full-blown upgrade.
To me, this means that the future rapid deployment customer already has SAP up and running. That process can, in my experience, consume more than three months.
What we are learning is that our clients expect changes to be made quickly. For example, we are building one of our news filtering systems. The entire project had to be designed, implemented, and made operational in four days. We hit the target.
I don’t have too many clients who think in terms of a minimum of 12 weeks for a solution. SAP has and I envy the time windows in which their work may be viewed. I look out the window of a jet plane, so my window is open only briefly. That seems to be a trend here in Harrod’s Creek.
The write up strikes me as wishful marketing type thinking packaged as an announcement. To an aging athlete, leisurely agility is as good as real agility I suppose. Just my opinion. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
Freebie
Aster Data Garners $30 Million
September 24, 2010
With increasing databases and demand for its successful conversion into meaningful rich resources, it is no wonder that the financial investors and promoters greatly acknowledge this remarkable opportunity, and foresee a tremendous growth in this sector. It is evident from the recent announcement from the market leader in big data management and data analysis for data-driven application, Aster Data, of accumulating a surplus fund of $30 million in its Series C round, contributed by its existing and new investors.
Riding on the explosive data volumes growth across organizations, Aster data has leveraged on the great demand for rich and advanced analytics, which has huge potential to tap on the gigantic $20 billion database market. Aster data’s recent press release asserts that its strong innovation and execution have led to double its revenue every year. This demonstrates a great momentum, which has been recognized by the renowned business organizations like the World Economic Forum, Gartner Inc., and won it excellence awards by TechWeb and San Francisco Business Times, for its product and service.
According to the press release, Aster Data has recently introduced nCluster 4.6 and its ‘Data-Analytics Server’, which is, “specifically designed to enable organizations to cost effectively store and analyze massive volumes of data,” with the help of the richer and faster processing ‘in-database’ analytics engine that uses MapReduce, a technology developed by Google. The company has attracted biggies like MySpace, comScore, Barnes & Noble, ShareThis, and Akamai, helping them with deeper insights into their data.
The high growth potential and proven market leadership has reinforced the trust of its existing investors and new industry visionaries like David Cheriton, who previously backed high-growth companies like Google and VMware. With lots of money in its booty, Aster Data wants to accelerate growth, scale operations, and expand its global market share. We believe in today’s computing scenario, such investments are definitely rewarding. The company can move in almost any direction it wishes. Will Aster Data stick with data management, data analytics, or move into closely allied data and information sectors? We will be watching.
See our interview with the new senior manager of Aster Data in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speaks collection.
Harleena Singh, September 24, 2010
Google Instant Revealed the Googley Way
September 24, 2010
Google revealed the secret of Google Instant to Technology Review. Point your browser to “Why Google Went Instant.” Here’s the trick, sort of:
Othar Hansson, tech lead for the feature, says that loading search results as you type only uses a few thousand bytes of data for each new set of 10 results and any text-based ads targeted to the search. “The people that manage our traffic barely even blinked when we said we’re going to have this effect on search traffic,” he said in a phone interview, “because we have this other thing called YouTube.” The five to 50 kilobytes of data in a new set of search results, even if they include image thumbnails, are tiny compared to even one second of online video. The real magic in Google Instant comes largely from advances in data-center hardware in the past 18 months, Hansson said. Faster servers and fatter connections between them are coupled with new tricks for caching the results for the majority of Google searches. Most searches typed by users aren’t very original. So when you type “bat” into Google, it’s statistically almost certain you’re going to keep going and type an additional “man” into the box. Rather than wait for you, Google sends over the results for “batman.”
The service is a great demo of Google’s computational and technical wizardry. My take on Instant is that there were three factors pointing the Googlers toward such a dramatic change:
First, Google wanted to do something to boost revenues. Instant seems to reward big sites and content that is popular.
Second, Instant derails some small site operators’ efforts to appear high in a Google results list. The reason is that a company associated with a broad term like “services” now has to work really hard or buy AdWords to get traffic
Third, Google made a splash, capturing the spotlight from the pesky companies who are now identified with hot products and services.
Did Google succeed? I turned it off. Your mileage may vary.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
