Quote to Note: Real Consultant Illuminates HP Autonomy
November 22, 2012
Heck, let’s put the 451 Group quote in granite.
I am getting ready to head from England, the land my ancestors fled in 1596, to return to Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, the culinary center for down home Thanksgiving cooking. (We do squirrel stew. How about you? Now I am sitting in the Dublin airport relishing comments allegedly made by a “real” expert, a 451 Group consultant no less. My source is “HP-Autonomy Fraud Allegations Fallout: The Winners and Losers.” Please, read the original article. It is priceless.
Here is what has me seeing those cartoon stars and exclamation points popular in the funny papers:
The fraud scandal “probably will” affect Autonomy’s fortunes “and I think that’s a shame…Autonomy always had very good technology, but they weren’t able to leverage it very effectively. In HP’s hands, it could be leveraged much better. On the other hand, Autonomy was “acting as a holding company to a large extent, anyway,” following many acquisitions. Only its core IDOL product is quite closely linked to the Autonomy name, “There are some good pieces there and still some strong brands.” (Attributed to a real consultant doing business as Alan Pelz-Sharp.)
Yowza. Consider these observations I jotted down.
- The word “probably”. Better safe than confident in one’s facts.
- I absolutely love “shame”. Yep, investment bankers are really sensitive to shame, particularly a year after a deal closes and the fees have been paid.
- The assertion “they [Autonomy] were not able to leverage it.” Stunning. I thought Autonomy had been in business for 13 or 14 years and had generated north of $700 million, bought a number of companies, and got its logo on a football team and an F1 car. To my albeit limited knowledge, no other search vendor has come close to Autonomy’s top line revenue. $700 million is a healthy figure and somewhere along the line taxes had to be paid, financial reviews conducted, and invoices sent.
- Autonomy was a holding company. Okay, this is not the analogy I would choose but let’s assume Autonomy was a holding company. Perhaps the 451 Group’s expert knows line of business revenues and pre tax profits by each of Autonomy’s operating units. Where are the breakdowns?
- Only IDOL is linked to Autonomy. My obviously misguided notion was that Autonomy bought a company and then slapped the IDOL brand on the company’s products and services. Then integration tagged along but Autonomy management worked hard to make IDOL the brand for many of its services as Autonomy managed the heck out of staff costs and embarked on upselling. Guess I was ill informed.
- “There are some good pieces” begs some detail. Perhaps a good piece is Virage or the virtual reality Aurasma technology which I covered in one of my Information Today columns?
- Again that categorical “only” troubles me but I will soldier on.
- Yes, I presume fraud will have some impact.
- I find the Latinate predicates stimulating as well.
Some color is in order.
451 Group (the “number” references either a science fiction novel or the flash point of paper, which is going out of fashion among some digerati) is a consulting and professional services firm with expertise in “cloudscape,” “multitenant data centers, and a half dozen other specialties. Disclaimer. I used to work for Booz, Allen & Hamilton and now I write “reports” for IDC, another outfit in the same line of work at 451. This means that one has to determine which consulting firm is on the beam. I will let the reader decide, but my bet is on folks who have done time at one of the pantheon firms, not the firms lower in the rental brains’ pecking order.
I have commented on Autonomy is a number of published reports. These range from the now hoary Enterprise Search Report which first appeared in 2003 or 2004 to my 2011 study “The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.” Free download here. I had to sit through various briefings, do some independent verification and validation work, and interact with some of the folks who had a little first hand experience with things Autonomy. I have to check my files, but I think I did a tiny job for Autonomy, but it is tough for me to remember after 40 years of blundering around in the online, search, and content processing sectors. Unlike the 451 Group’s experts, I am not qualified in the cloudscape thing or the multi whozit. I am so so in search and okay in a couple of other disciplines. I eat squirrels too.
My official position is that folks who license enterprise search systems like Autonomy or Endeca usually wind up with some interesting challenges and some hefty bills. When one taps Autonomy-like system or even a free, open source search solution, the likelihood of financial excitement six months into a search project is quite high. When signing on for an enterprise search system, arrogance and ignorance on the part of the customer can equal the spirit of a gaggle of Googlers. One difference: The Googlers are usually okay with resources, money, code and math. Procurement teams, in my experience, assume their intellectual firepower would decimate other mortals. Wrong. But optimism can be a positive attribute. Just not in big time search solutions.
Enter the marketers, lawyers, and MBAs.
Now a covey of these professionals can draw fascinating conclusions about enterprise search. My problem with the write up and the quote is that the facts of the matter are stark. HP paid billions for a search vendor. HP is in a bit of a financial muddle. HP wants to blame everyone except itself. The losers omitted from the write up are the ones which matter: HP employees, HP management, and the HP Board of Directors.
Maybe the accounting was erroneous. Maybe the auditors stayed up late and drifted through the various audits. Maybe the lawyers, MBAs, and auditors were more focused on their billable hours and commissions. Maybe Autonomy explained how search and content processing deals worked and assumed that the HP team “understood” the upsides and downsides of search.
Somewhere along the line “real” consultants and the legions of people grabbing a piece of the billion dollar deal may be revealing their own intellectual shortcomings. Search is tough. The price HP paid for Autonomy is what it is. A year after buying a property, HP wants its money back. That’s the charming world of business today.
With “real” consultants and big companies looking for a silver bullet to complete their imaginary magic wands, bad deals are the rule. What makes Autonomy interesting is the amount paid by a company which is fraught with management, financial, and technical challenges. I used to keep a list of missteps. But after fumbling the Alta Vista search system opportunity, I lost interest. HP and the “real” consultants want to explain away a mistake without pointing out who triggered the problem. Arrogance, superficial analysis, and lack of search expertise caught fire when big money was in play. Combustible mixture? Yes, indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2012
IBM Pure Competes with Oracle Exadata Line
November 22, 2012
Large tech companies, such as Oracle and IBM, are addressing Big Data challenges by releasing integrated systems that are designed with hardware and software created to work together for maximum performance. However, these systems are still working out some flaws, according to the article “Oracle’s Secret Sauce: Why Exadata is Rocking the Tech Industry” on Forbes. We learn in the article that some engineered systems are struggling to compete with Oracle’s tested Exadata line in terms of cost and performance.
The article tells us:
“But even IBM is finding that the move to truly optimized and engineered systems takes more than just packaging some components together, which is about the extent of their effort with their initial Pure Systems. Those machines offer only a limited amount of focused IP to optimize the platforms. In addition, while Exadata handles all workloads in one system, IBM has come out with 3 separate database platforms based upon varying workloads.”
However, we believe IBM Pure and similar systems are highly beneficial and necessary for companies because of proven data delivery results and support. The company’s reliance on trusted integrators such as Intrafind helps customers make the best of infrastructure, application, and execution of enterprise search.
Andrea Hayden, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PolySpot Technologies are Integral Piece to Best Practices with Big Data
November 22, 2012
Often times when the phrase big data is thrown around, organizations lose sight of the word ‘data’ and its relation to their overall goal as it pertains to extracting intelligence and information from the petabytes. HealthWorks Collective delivers up a reminder in the article, “Big Data, Small Data… Size Doesn’t Matter, Data Management Does.” It is east to get lost in the voluminous ‘big’, but that idea in itself would not amount to anything significant.
The article recommends that organizations in the healthcare industry take the initial step to benefiting from big data and transferring records from paper to digital files.
However, there is a step that precedes digitizing information:
But as the EHR/EMR supply grew and got more diverse, it seems that the problem is not so much to use or not to use these tools, but to find the right one that would adapt the physicians’ practice, workflow and habits. Through flexible, software-as-a-service-based solutions, for example. So, more than going digital, the first step would be to find a flexible, customizable tool to match the best the specifications of your practice.
The steps do not end there. Learning best practices with big data is an integral piece to the puzzle and should be another consideration in choosing a software vendor. Consulting and support matters in a vital way; best practices are the difference between information being delivered to the right users at the right time. We have been particularly impressed with PolySpot in this regard.
Megan Feil, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Synata Unveils SAAS for the Enterprise
November 22, 2012
Synata is a San Francisco start-up that is soon to unveil as disruptive search platform for the enterprise cloud. As part of their efforts, they are seeking the opinions of major users of the following services: LinkedIn, Google Apps, and Zendesk. The San Francisco Chronicle gives the full perspective in, “San Francisco Startup Bringing Enterprise Search to the Cloud, Looking to Talk to Salesforce, LinkedIn, Zendesk, and Google Apps Users.”
Patrick White, the founder of Synata, gives his overview of the product:
‘Call it decision-point data, or real-time insight, or anything you want, but we’re going to make it insanely simple to search across your cloud data sources easily and get answers quickly.’ said Patrick White, Co-founder and CEO . . . But, the vision for Synata isn’t just about search – it’s also about giving users a really elegant way view data about a single topic or person, even when that data comes from a lot of different places. Eventually the platform will allow users to answer hard questions and find connections in their data they never knew were there.
It looks like Synata is doing two things: enterprise search and Web site search. We have not had much experience with this new product, but it seems like Fabasoft Mindbreeze might already be tackling both of these tasks. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Insite offers Cloud based maintenance-free Web site search for your public facing sites. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise offers an enterprise search solutions that works as a standalone piece or serves as a compliment to an existing Sharepoint infrastructure. Either way, service is quick, customer-oriented, and cost-efficient. New and exciting names and ideas will continue to pop up in the enterprise world, but sometimes its good to stick to the ones that you know, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Big Money for Open Source Company
November 22, 2012
If someone told you that there wasn’t any money to be made in open source technology, first tell them they are extremely wrong and then have them read this article from Tech Crunch called “Open Source Business Intelligence Company Pentaho Lands $23 Million Series C.” Pentaho is an open source business intelligence vendor and the company landed $23 million in funding from investors, the biggest contributor being New Enterprise Associates. Pentaho has led four prior funding rounds, bringing the total to $55 million.
Going over the company’s history, this is another success for them:
“The company was founded in 2004 and raised a $5 million series A from New Enterprise Associates with participation from Index Ventures. It later raised a $8 million series B from the same two firms in 2006. Venture Beat reported a $12 million 3rd round from Benchmark Capital in 2008, and according to SEC documents Pentaho raised an additional $7 million from undisclosed investors in 2010.”
As a major player in the open source field, Pentaho has most notably been known for its software that adds native support for NoSQL Databases, Apache Hadoop distributions, columnar databases, and traditional relational databases. Its Kettle, an data integration platform, was released earlier this year. Pentaho will use the money to fund more open source projects. We have to wait and see what develops. We already know what is to develop with LucidWorks, an open source search company. LucidWorks is where the open source search experts are and they have some of the most robust and powerful search applications for Big Data and the Cloud.
Whitney Grace, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Rocking Search Expert Calls for Congress to Target Search Engines
November 22, 2012
I never thought that I would see the day when the singer of Jack and Diane would be speaking out against Google and attacking internet copyright laws. According to the recent CNet piece, “John Mellencamp: Congress Must Target Search Engines”, the musician wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in the Huffington Post calling for a revision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Mellencamp is not the only one making this argument. the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America feel the same way. Last year, however, their legislative effort the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), was designed to make allegedly piratical Web sites virtually disappear from the Internet.
Once major websites started disappearing, SOPA was met with protests from millions of internet users and SOPA lobbyers backed off.
Google however, does have a system in place to deal with copyright infringement:
“For its part, Google says it receives 1.2 million requests per month to remove links to pages, with Microsoft being the most frequent complainant, followed by the RIAA and movie studios.
It says it complies with 97 percent of the requests, which are submitted under a process created by the DMCA for the benefit of copyright holders — a turbocharged takedown process not available to people who believe their privacy is violated by a YouTube video, for instance, or think a blog post is libelous or defamatory.”
While this system may not be perfect, it will have to do for now. America loves their free music and movies and it appears that it may lead to the death of both industries.
Jasmine Ashton, November 22, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Forrester 2012, Gartner 2010, and Autonomy
November 21, 2012
I don’t have much interaction with Autonomy and I have even less with Forrester or Gartner, both azure chip consultants stuffed with high IQ big thinkers about technology. How can someone residing in Harrod’s Creek hope to compare to sleek, real consultants who work in cities with electricity and running water.
However, on a recent trip to a dumpy Internet cafe near Victoria Station, I read “Hewlett’s Loss: A Folly Unfolds, by the Numbers.” In that article I noted this quote from an azure chip consultant working at the tony Forrester Research outfit. Here’s the passage that made my feathers twitch:
Autonomy, too, was facing challenges after years of fast growth but poor customer relations, according to Leslie Owens, an analyst with Forrester Research. “They didn’t invest in R&D; they didn’t have regular software releases; they weren’t transparent with a road map of where they were going; they didn’t seek customer feedback,” she said. “Customers complained, but the promise of managing all their information and making better decisions was so attractive. They bought more.” Soon after the H.P. acquisition, Ms. Owens said, Autonomy announced a new version of its core product. “We asked for a demo,” she said, and “we’re still waiting.”
Okay. I remember seeing a Boston Consulting Group dog, question mark, star, and cow type chart in 2009. Allegedly produced by another high end think tank, Gartner Group. I did not recall Autonomy getting low marks. I did some poking around and I would like to direct you, gentle reader, to this Web address: http://www.contentmanager.eu.com/graphics/gartner-wcm2010.jpg.
I am fearful of azure chip retribution, so you have to navigate to the page and look at the 2010 BCG style chart by Gartner Group experts.
What is interesting is that Gartner pegs Autonomy in the leaders quadrant for Web content management. I don’t know what that means. I do understand what it means to be a “leader”, singled out for excellence on whatever yardstick was used to size up 17 vendors of a particular type of enterprise software.
What is interesting is that two expert consulting firms have such conflicting opinions about Autonomy less than 18 to 20 months apart. Forrester “knows” that Autonomy had some issues. Gartner seems to find the company superior to such rivals as IBM and Microsoft.
Did Autonomy crash and burn between these two azure chip viewpoints? Are Forrester’s analysts more sveltish and brighter than Gartner’s high protein crowd?
Assume that each of these consulting outfits have comparable intellectual horsepower. Assume that each firm’s experts gathered information from open source and private sources. What causes two apparently superficial assessments of Autonomy.
My question: “If two blue chip consultants see Autonomy differently, won’t the truth and beauty of Autonomy will be in the eye of the beholder?”
In a legal dispute, subjective, maybe emotion, will play a larger role than dull old objective data. Little wonder so many advisors interpreted Autonomy differently. Enterprise software as an interpretation problem in 21st century business poetry. Lawyers are happy. HP and its shareholders, not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, November 21, 2012
Search and the Poetic Giant Stinking Mess
November 21, 2012
I did not craft that elegant phrase “giant stinking mess.” I am not Shakespeare of software. Turn to “It’s Not Just HP And Autonomy, The Enterprise Software Space Is A Giant Stinking Mess.” The article is a good example of a meta-play. One takes a newsy item like Hewlett Packard’s realization that it may have overpaid for Autonomy, watched the founders exit, and then figured out that enterprise search is not quite what it seems. The idea is that enterprise software is going “social” and that the data science behind workflow is the future. The article told me:
Berkholz’s [an expert at RedMonk] post reflects how not all is rotten in the enterprise world. EMC is taking steps to adapt to the new collaborative market. It’s also evident at SAP, VMware and even in some quarters at HP. But the cult of sales still looms over these big companies. Breaking down that culture means creating a new dynamic that embraces modern social and collaborative practices.
Okay, I agree that looking at a particular issue from a different elevation is useful. Let’s assume that social and a collaborative market is the future.
I just wrapped up 13 or 14 reports for IDC. I focused on open source enterprise search. What I learned was that it is getting tough to figure out where an open source search company and an proprietary search company differ. The most successful of the open source vendors look quite a bit like traditional software vendors. One open source vendor in my report—IBM—is a proprietary outfit which uses open source search technology. More interesting is that IBM keeps its arms around its traditional business model. The “new” IBM is not much different from the “old” IBM. Open source software allows IBM to shave off some costs and deploy expensive engineers in what seems to be higher value work.
The question is, “Why do open source search vendors drift toward the traditional business models?” My opinion is that these business models produce revenue and yield margins when they work. What are the elements of a traditional software business model for the enterprise? Those which come to mind include:
- License fees for something—software, upgrades, support
- Variable fees for some other things—engineering services, specialized code widgets, access to previews at a slick looking lab
- Box office tickets for training, webinars, etc.
- Premier services so that the best engineers respond right away to a problem
- A surcharge for working with a pre-eminent firm
- Options like cloud services, appliances, remote optimization
A software company has to produce revenue and my hunch is that this line up of options for a business model exist because customers want these services. When a software company has to generate revenue, the traditional business model is something that investors and stakeholders understand.
One can pop up a level and invoke social, collaboration, and even open sourciness. At the half time news break, the talk turns to booking revenue. Deals will be crafted which meet the resources the client has available. Are these deals convoluted and opaque? Do accountants write haikus? Not too often. Enterprise software, even when delivered from something as wonderful as the Amazon cloud, can become hideously complex and fraught with Byzantine pricing.
I like popping up a level. Revenue generation has a way of bringing some of these viewpoints down to the ground zero.
Stephen E Arnold, November 21, 2012
x
Exclusive Interview with Rosoka NLP Developer, Mike Sorah
November 21, 2012
I continue to learn about companies with high-value content processing technologies. The challenge in real-time translation, if one believes the Google marketing, is now in “game over” mode. The winner, of course, is Google. Other firms can head to the showers and maybe think about competing in another business sector.
But some of that Google confidence may be based on assumptions about Google’s language processing expertise, not more recent systems and methods. I know. This is “burn at the stake” information to a Googler.
However, I saw a demonstration which made clear to me that Google’s “kitchen sink” approach to figuring out how to handle speech input and near real time translation may not be in step with other firm’s approaches. The company with some quite interesting translation technology and a commitment to easy integration is IMT Holdings. The privately held company’s product is Rosoka.
IMT Holdings, Corp. was founded in 2007. Our background is in US government contracting. In the course of the firm’s work, Mr. Sorah saw that the existing NLP or Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools were not able to handle the volumes and complexities of the data they needed to process. In December of 2011, IMT began actively marketing its NLP technology.
I was able after some telephone tag and email to interview Mike Sorah, one of the co-founders of IMT and one of the wizards behind the Rosoka technology.
Mr. Sorah told me:
Many of the existing NLP tools claim to be multilingual, but what they mean is that they have linguistic knowledge bases usually acquired from vendors who provide dictionaries and libraries that make NLP an issue for many licensees. But most of the NLP system don’t process documents that contain English and Chinese or English and Spanish. In the world of our clients, mixed language documents are important. These have to be processed as part of the normal stream, not put in an exception folder and maybe never processed or processed after a delay of hours or days.
The Rosoka system is different from other NLP and translation systems on the market at this time. He asserted:
In most multilingual NLP systems, the customer needs to know before they process the document what language the document is so they can load the appropriate language-specific knowledge base. What we did via our proprietary Rosoka algorithms was to take a multilingual look at the world. Our system automatically understands that a document may be in English or Chinese, or even English and Spanish mixed. The language angle is huge. We randomly sample Twitter stream and have been tweeting the top 10 languages of the week are. English varies between 35 to 45% of the tweets. Every language that Rosoka can process is included. Our multilingual support is not not sold as separate, add-on functionality.
You can read the full text of the interview with Mike Sorah in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series at this link. More information about IMT and Rosoka is available from the firm’s Web site, http://www.imtholdings.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, November 21, 2012
Intrafind Focuses on Managing and Classifying Data Automatically
November 21, 2012
We continue our in-depth look into software publisher Intrafind this week with another focus on the many features we have found available from the company. In addition to the proven iFinder Enterprise Search product as well as the particularly useful Tagging Service, we noted other highlights on a recent navigation of the company’s Web site.
Of specific interest was TopicFinder, an automated text classification system for topic recognition and document analysis. This product allows users to automatically gather and use information which goes beyond the typical word-based content search of documents. The main purpose of the tool is to filter and manage information. The Web site explains:
“Using the TopicFinder, for example, incoming mail from customers can be automatically forwarded to the most appropriate person responsible, or depending on their content news from news tickers can be forwarded to the editorial staff responsible for sports, politics or economic affairs.
The TopicFinder can be either specially trained regarding the information needs of the customer or it can be used with a pretrained general hierarchy of topics. The tool works fully automatically. There is no need for manual tagging. The quality of the classification is very high as the TopicFinder is based on recent linguistic and mathematical / information-theoretical methods.”
We believe this automatic tool is groundbreaking in the attempt to manage and navigate Big Data, because not all data consists simply of words. We are impressed with Intrafind’s attempt to step into this territory. The enterprise data company is located in Germany and has been making such bold moves since beginning operation in 2000. The team consists of 25 specialists who provide analysis and support. For more information, please turn to the company’s homepage.
Andrea Hayden, November 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
