Encomium For Oracle And CRM
December 9, 2013
Oracle has made a new acquisition, according to CMSWire in the article, “Oracle Adds InQuira Knowledge Management Technology To CRM Offerings.” Oracle purchased InQuira in hopes to strengthen its stance in the customer relationship management market. By acquiring InQuira, Oracle gains CRM technology for analytics and knowledge management. Oracle wants a piece of the $4 billion revenue CRM pie predicted for 2014. Microsoft, SalesForce.com, and SAP are the company’s biggest rivals. One of the ways Oracle’s rivals stay on the top is by continuing to add new features to their products, such as social media integration. Oracle hopes InQuira’s technology will give it the same, if not better, competitive edge.
“Oracle is a huge software company and its Fusion suite is massive. Many may wonder why Oracle elected to acquire InQuira’s knowledge management technology instead of building its own. Knowledge management is a specialized area and InQuira is one of the market leaders. Acquiring InQuira means Oracle acquires the InQuira’s market leadership — if Oracle can do a good job integrating the technology into its existing product offerings.”
Oracle saves time and cuts development costs by purchasing a company already acknowledged as a leader in the CRM market. InQuira’s reputation and client base is now transferred to Oracle. Was it a good strategic move? Most definitely.
Whitney Grace, December 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Look No Further for Oracle Documentation
December 9, 2013
Oracle prides itself on its Secure Enterprise Search that is advertised as offering secure, high quality search that easily works across all information sources on the enterprise format. The search product digs deep in local, private, and shared files housed on databases, intranets, document management systems, applications, and portals. With great ease it crawls and indexes results, guaranteeing that the first items in the results list are the most relevant. Also the Secure Enterprise Search offers analytics on search results and usage patterns.
Oracle provides current and prospective clients with “Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Documentation.” Oracle has released the 11g version of the Secure Enterprise Search with the following key assets:
· “Highly secure crawling, indexing, and searching
· A simple, intuitive search interface with browsing and display of search results by automatically-extracted topic and metadata attribute clusters
· Excellent search quality, with the most relevant items for a query shown first, even when the query spans diverse public or private data sources
· Analytics on search results and understanding of usage patterns
· Sub-second query performance
· Ease of administration and maintenance leveraging your existing IT expertise.”
Oracle continues to be one of the reliable enterprise searches, but like most software these days it faces strong competition from open source technology.
Whitney Grace, December 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Thinking about Big Data
December 9, 2013
Big data primarily consists of unstructured data that forces knowledge professionals to spend 25% of their time searching for information, says Peter Auditore and George Everitt in their article “The Anatomy Of Big Data” published by Sand Hill. The pair run down big data’s basic history and identify four pillars that encompass all the data types: big tables, big text, big metadata, and big graphs. They identify Hadoop as the most important big data technology.
Big data companies and projects are anticipated to drive more than $200 billion in IT spending, but the sad news is that only a small number of these companies are currently turning a profit. One of the main reasons is that open source is challenging proprietary companies. It is noted that users are selling their data to social media Web sites. Users have become more of a product than a client and social media giants are not sharing a user’s personal information with the actual user.
Social media is large part of the big data bubble:
“The majority of organizations today are not harvesting and staging Big Data from these networks but are leveraging a new breed of social media listening tools and social analytics platforms. Many are employing their public relations agencies to execute this new business process. Smarter data-driven organizations are extrapolating social media data sets and performing predictive analytics in real time and in house. There are, however, significant regulatory issues associated with harvesting, staging and hosting social media data. These regulatory issues apply to nearly all data types in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services in particular.”
Guess what one of the biggest big data startups is? Social media big data analytics.
The article ends by stating that big data helps organizations make better use of their data assets and it will improve decision-making. This we already know, but Auditore and Everitt do provide some thought-provoking insights.
Whitney Grace, December 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elsevier: A Fresh Approach to Work for Hire
December 8, 2013
I do work for hire. The idea, as I implement it, requires someone to pay me; for example, a publisher like Galatea, IDC, or Pandia Press. I then submit written information for that money. The publisher can do with the information whatever the purchaser wants. Some publishers have spotty records of payment, but after working for “real” journalism and publishing outfits for years, slow pay or in some cases no pay is more common than I thought. I like to reflect on my naive understanding of the information business in 1954 when I wrote for money “Burger Boat Drive In” for the St Louis Post Dispatch. Think of it: That time span covers 60 years.
I read “Academia.edu Slammed with Takedown Notices from Journal Publisher Elsevier.” I found the write up amusing. I thought that “real” publishers had cracked down on tricky PhDs and “experts” who posted their research on their blogs or on silly academic or public-service-type Web sites a long time ago.
I was dead wrong. It seems that Elsevier, a renowned scientific and technical publisher, was asleep at the switch. Elsevier owns part of Reed Elsevier, another top flight information outfit. If anyone could locate duplicate content, it would be the experts at Elsevier. After all, at their fingertips were duplicate busting online search tools like LexisNexis text mining and search systems. A mouse click away is Google’s outstanding search system. For the more sophisticated investigator, Elsevier can use tools from Dassault or Yandex to locate improper use of content Elsevier owns.
A happy quack to Wikipedia at http://bit.ly/1d3pH7l
The write up tells me:
“In the past, Elsevier has sent out one or two DMCAs a week,” Price [Academia.edu’s top dog] wrote. “Then, a few weeks ago, Elsevier started sending Academia.edu DMCA take-down notices in batches of a thousand for papers that academics had uploaded to the site. This is what has caused the recent outcry in the blogosphere and Twitter.”
So what’s the big deal?
The article tries to answer my question:
Still, Elsevier’s ramping up of take-down requests is reminiscent of the shake-up happening as a result of the rise of massively open online courses, which have enabled millions to learn at a high level — for free. It could be that the basic premise of Academia.edu will throw things off kilter for publishers and cause them to react. And it even has a bit of the flavor of Aaron Swartz’s efforts to liberate academic papers from the premium site JSTOR.
I am not sure but I don’t think Mr. Swartz weathered the “free content” storm particularly well.
Digital Reasoning Unleashes Human Analysis to the Cloud
December 8, 2013
Digital Reasoning has built its reputation by providing products that automate the understanding of human communication. One could say they put the humanity in technology. Digital Reasoning has taken its technology to a “higher” level says Broadway World, “Digital Reasoning Debuts Cloud Version Of Its Machine Learning Platform That Analyzes Human Language, Set Sights On Data Scientists.” The Synthesys Machine Learning Platform will be released on the AWS Marketplace and will be available as Synthesys Cloud.
Digital Reasoning hopes that by putting the Synthesys Cloud on AWS Marketplace will allow its clients to process and analyze larger amounts of unstructured data faster and more efficiently. It will also offer a large number of benefits to data scientists:
- “Rather than spending time on IT tasks such as installing and configuring various hardware and software components, users are able to launch a Synthesys cluster with just a few clicks allowing them to focus on uploading, analyzing and exploring data.
- Synthesys simplifies the parsing of human language data such as Web content, documents, emails and other electronic communications into semantically rich structures (i.e. entities, facts and relationships) so that data scientists do not have to be subject matter experts in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
- Synthesys Cloud offers initial support for 3rd party query tools such as Apache Hive, which gives users power and flexibility to explore and visualize Synthesys output.
- Synthesys Cloud on the AWS Marketplace makes it easy and affordable for any budget to pay-as-they-go by taking advantage of low hourly billing rates and the ability to combine Synthesys with other AWS offerings.”
This company stresses how Synthesys Cloud is an amazing, new tool for data scientists. However, it offers separate reasons as to why it is beneficial for other clients as well. Is the company thinking that business professionals will approach the software differently than data scientists?
Whitney Grace, December 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yellowfin and Its Business Intelligence Spin
December 7, 2013
I read “Yellowfin Launches Yellowfin 7 Analytics Platform: Makes Enterprise-Wide Data Discovery Easy.” The company’s Web site asserts that Yellowfin is Ranked #1. The page explains that “global BI vendor surveys” attest to this stature. (Please, note that the company’s url is www.yellowfinbi.com, not www.yellowfin.com. The “yellowfin.com” name resolves to a previously owned boat vendor.)
The three reasons for Yellowfin’s stature, according to the company’s Web site, are:
- Ranked number 1 compared to world’s foremost BI vendors. I did not see any links to the referenced studies but I am tired from shoveling snow.
- Standout vendor in emerging, dashboard and innovation categories. I did not see how many other categories were used to rank innovative business intelligence vendors. The snow was heavy and wet. Tough to cut through.
- Challenging traditional BI vendors. I did not see any specifics about how Yellowfin is tackling IBM SPSS, SAS, Recorded Future, Palantir, or Talend, but my fatigue may be contributing to this oversight on my part.
The news I received via email quotes Glen Rabie, Yellowfin CEO, who says:
Yellowfin 7 “delivered beautiful, balanced and brilliant analytics software that makes stunningly simple enterprise-wide Data Discovery easy.”
I like “beautiful,” “brilliant,” and “stunningly simple” analytics. I assume the software alerts the user when the data are corrupted or the analytic method and the information fed into the numerical recipe are mismatched. In my experience, fiddling with numbers and different mathematical procedures can produce some interesting results.
Mr. Rabie continues:
You’ve heard people talk-up self-service BI because of its ability to circumvent the IT bottleneck. With Yellowfin 7, we’ve stepped it up again. We’ve completely redesigned and rebuilt the report authoring process, from the ground up, to enable independent Data Discovery….Yellowfin 7’s new interface for analysis lets you instantly understand the impact of your data selections on the content you’re creating, empowering users to achieve deeper understanding in less time and build the most insightful BI content possible – every time.
The company offers interactive dashboards, collaboration tools, mobile access, and exception reporting. Yellowfin is a “complete BI platform.” Based on the information in the news I received, Yellowfin seems to have overhauled its system rolled out a decade ago.
One observation: The tone and word choice used to describe what looks like an interesting product.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2013
Big Twitter Upgrade
December 7, 2013
Twitter revamped its apps for Android and iPhones the other day, says Business Insider in the article: “New Twitter App Features.” The upgrade comes after Twitter decided it wanted its users to find content a lot easier and direct messaging has been altered as well. Twitter made the strategic decision to incorporate TV Trends into the app.
It has been tested over the summer and adds a new level of interaction between users:
“The basis of the TV trends section is that you can chat about your favorite show with other fans but that seems to be about it. All you need to do to access it is head to the “Discover” section of the app. Enter the trending option and head all the way down to the bottom. After that, you can talk about it various elements of either “American Horror Story” or “Late Night with David Letterman.” This is where filters come into play since each sub-section only posts the most prominent tweet.”
Timelines now flow into the trending section with the most prominent trends displayed. Filters also work in this section by providing insight into local areas, events, and conversations when you adjust the parameters to find local content.
Twitter has added another sophisticated layer to the social tool. Researchers can use it to discover trends in actual real-time as well as connecting people on a more local level. It does contribute to the privacy invasion factor, kind of creepy if you ask me.
Whitney Grace, December 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search and Crowdsourcing: Verbase via Hong Kong
December 6, 2013
Short honk: You may wonder what a crowd sourced search engine is. If you poke around the mainstream Web indexes like Google and Bing, there are some tantalizing clues. Blekko and DuckDuckGo have used the word “crowd sourced” to entice users. With a bit more digging you may come across a search engine from Verbase. The news release, issued in October 2013, explains the notion in this way:
Powered by human intelligence, Verbase delivers more direct results for text-based searches, and enables users to add comments and original content to search results. Verbase is currently receiving over 50,000 unique monthly visitors to its site.
Google is mostly algorithms, most of the time. Rumors of humans tinkering with the giant’s findability system drift around, but Google likes nests of numerical recipes. Humans are, well, human, slow, and often prone to playing volleyball and sleeping.
A Verbase results screen for the query “Fulcrum Technologies Ful/Text”.
The Verbase approach uses three methods:
- A search box that offers category filters. (These look like the Blekko “slash” functions.)
- What the company calls an “automatic user ranking algorithm” that considers “engagement.” (Perhaps this means clicking and the time spent in a results list?)
- A “micro content” function that allows a user to create content. (Does this echo Vivisimo’s approach on steroids?)
According to the news release:
Founded by serial entrepreneur Antoine Sorel Neron, Verbase is a semantic search engine powered by human intelligence that relieves user frustration associated with spam, advertising, and irrelevant search results.
Several observations:
First, Google’s utility is not what it used to be. Search is not about precision and recall. Search is the source of money that funds synthetic biology investments and systems that are tuned to deliver brand advertising. Verbase is one company willing to point out that Google generates results that are sometimes less than useful to online searchers.
Second, Verbase is, like many other Web search companies, hitting some hot buttons to generate interest; for example, crowd sourcing. This is a good idea if methods exist to cope with the issues associated with uncontrolled indexing and content.
Third, the location of the company appears to be Hong Kong. Is this one more example of the center of technology starting to tip somewhere other than longitude of Highway 101?
The system is worth a look. My test queries returned useful results. The graphic approach reminded me of Exalead’s Web search system from three or four years ago. I noted that the system handled an odd ball product name “Ful/Text” reasonably well. Some competitors’ systems insisted that I really wanted “full text.” Wrong.
Verbase brought a smile to my face by returning results that I judged “relevant.” Worth a test drive.
Stephen E Arnold, December 6, 2013
SharePoint 2013 Hybrid Governance Support
December 6, 2013
SharePoint grows in breadth and depth with every update. SharePoint 2013 offers more features than ever before. However, the time and expertise it takes to customize those features is becoming more and more demanding. For that reason, organizations are looking for add-ons and intuitive customization options without a lot of hassle. PRWeb gives another good option in its latest release, “Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Hybrid Support Highlights New Release of AvePoint DocAve Governance Automation Service Pack 4.”
The release begins:
“AvePoint, the leader in governance, compliance, and management solutions for social enterprise collaboration platforms, announced today the latest version of its flagship product for automated service and proactive governance enforcement, DocAve Governance Automation Service Pack (SP) 4, with support for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 hybrid deployments.”
Finding and analyzing all the latest add-ons and SharePoint supplemental services can be exhausting. Many would benefit from a news service that boils down the important stuff. That’s just what Stephen E. Arnold does with ArnoldIT. A long-time leader in enterprise search, his recent attention has turned to enterprise search, and his expertise is invaluable.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 6, 2013
A Search Library for Python
December 6, 2013
Python is one of the many programming languages available. Programmers rely on already existing libraries and open source to help them create new projects. Bitbucket points our attention to “Whoosh-Python Search Library” that appears to be a powerful open source solution to satisfy you search woes.
The article states:
“Whoosh is a fast, featureful full-text indexing and searching library implemented in pure Python. Programmers can use it to easily add search functionality to their applications and websites. Every part of how Whoosh works can be extended or replaced to meet your needs exactly.”
What can Whoosh do? It has fielded indexing, fast indexing and retrieval, a powerful query language, the only production quality pure Python spell-checker, pluggable scoring algorithm, and a Pythonic API. Whoosh was built to handle situations where the programmer needs to avoid creating native libraries, make a research platform, provides one deeply-integrated search solution, and has an easy-to-use interface.
Whoosh started out as a search solution for proprietary software. Matt Chaput designed it for Side Effects Software Inc.’s animation software Houdini. Side Effects Software allowed Chaput to release the library to the open source community and many Python programmers probably consider it an early Christmas gift.
Whitney Grace, December 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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