Attivio is Synonymous with Partnership
December 21, 2013
If you need a business intelligence solution, apparently Attivio is the one stop shop to go. Attivio has formed two strategic partnerships. The Providence Journal announced that “Actian And Attivio OEM Agreement Accelerates Big Data Business Value By Integrating Big Content.” Actian, a big data analytics company, has an OEM agreement with Attivio to use its Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) to ramp their data analytics solution. AIE completes Actian’s goal to deliver analytics on all types of data from social media to surveys to research documents.
The article states:
” ‘Big Content has become a vital piece in the Big Data puzzle,’ said David Schubmehl, Research Director, IDC. ‘The majority of enterprise information created today is human-generated, but legacy systems have traditionally required processing structured data and unstructured content separately. The addition of Attivio AIE to Actian ParAccel provides an extremely cost-effective option that delivers impressive performance and value.’ “
Panorama announced on its official Web site that, “Panorama And Attivio Announce BI Technology Alliance Partnership.” The AIE will be combined with Panorama’s software to improve the business value of content and big data. Panorama’s BI solution will use the AIE to streamline enterprise decision-making processes by eliminating the need to switch between applications to access data. This will speed up business productivity and improve data access.
The article explains:
“ ‘One of the goals of collaborative BI is to connect data, insights and people within the organization,’ said Sid Probstein, CTO at Attivio. ‘The partnership with Panorama achieves this because it gives customers seamless and intuitive discovery of information from sources as varied as corporate BI to semi-structured data and unstructured content.’”
Attivio is a tool used to improve big data projects to enhance usage of data. The company’s strategy to be a base for other solutions to be built on is similar to what Fulcrum Technologies did in 1985.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Scientific Data Going Going Gone
December 20, 2013
Years ago I did a report for a sci-tech database publisher. I wrote up the results of a number of on site visits at research universities. I reported that there was no mechanism to preserve researchers’ data. The reason was pretty obvious: Research facilities at universities are less important than sports teams, business activities, and fund raising. When the researcher moved on, the data just sat somewhere until there was a housecleaning or a hard drive wiped. If financial support disappeared, none of the facilities I visited had an old school records management system in place. If a researcher took the data with him or her, those data may or may not have been managed in a thoughtful way. On to the next grant, tally ho.
I was not surprised to read “Researchers Say Valuable Scientific Data Disappearing at Alarming Rate.” (If this link 404s you are on your own, you Google search experts, you.) Here’s the passage I noted:
While all data sets were available two years after publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that, they reported.
So when did I do my report for the grand viziers at the sci-tech outfit? It was 1998. How about that data half life?
Why didn’t the database publishing company fund a program to archive research data? In my experience, the notion of capturing raw data was too far from the familiar path of summarizing articles and selling access to those summaries to libraries.
Too late now? Maybe. This is one more example of “if it is not available, how can one search for information and data”? Will the sci-tech database company remember my report and diagram? Nah. The familiar way is the better way I suppose.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2013
HP Autonomy: Marketing Collateral from 2011
December 20, 2013
One of the ArnoldIT goslings called to my attention a 2011 PDF white paper with the title (I kid you not):
Human inFormation (sic): Cloud, pan enterprise search, automation, video search, audio search, discovery, infrastructure platfo9rm, Big Data, business process management, mobile search, OEMs, and advanced analytics.
I checked on December 19, 2013, and this PDF was available at http://bit.ly/19Vwkqg.
That covers a lot of ground even for HP with or without Autonomy. The analysis includes some “factoids”; for example:
- Unstructured data represents 85% of all information but structure information is growing at 22% CAGR
- Unstructured information is growing at 62% CAGR.
- Users upload 35 hours of video every minute
- Unstructured data will grow to over 35 zettabytes by 2020
- Videos on YouTube were viewed 2 billion times per day, 20 times more than in 2006.
You get the idea. With lots of data, information is a problem. I need to pause a moment and catch my breath.
Well, “it’s not just about search.” Again, I must pause. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, and three Mississippi. Okay.
Fundamentally, the ability to understand meaning and automatically process information is all about distance, probabilities, relativeness (sic), definitions, slang, and more. It is an overwhelming and continually growing problem that requires advanced technology to solve.
One technique is to use structured data methods to solve the unstructured problem. (Wasn’t this the approach taken by Fulcrum Technologies, what? 25 or 30 years ago? I just read a profile of Fulcrum that suggested Fulcrum did this first and continues chugging along within the OpenText product line up which competes directly with HP in information archiving.
HP points out, “People are Lazy.” More interesting is this observation, “People are stupid.” I thought about HP’s write off of billions after owning a company for a couple of years, but I assume that HP means “other people” are stupid, not HP people.
SharePoint May Not be Dying
December 20, 2013
There is an endless argument being held over whether or not SharePoint is on its way out. On way hand, it is the most widely adopted enterprise platform. On the other hand, this huge piece of software is hard to maintain, customize, and keep up to date. There are strong arguments on both sides, but IT Web takes their stand in the article, “Why SharePoint is not Dying.”
Among its list of reasons, the article says:
“Most businesses are still struggling to gain control of their information, something that, in my opinion, is now a necessity and no longer just a nice-to-have. When I look at businesses that haven’t implemented SharePoint or similar technologies, it becomes obvious that these businesses struggle to operate efficiently in our fast-paced world. Continued exponential growth in the volume and speed of access to information and communication will force businesses to adopt information management solutions or face increasing difficulty.”
And while SharePoint may not be on its way out, it will definitely have to stay agile and adapt quickly in order to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive market. Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT is a longtime leader in search, and he follows the latest in SharePoint. Keep an eye out for the future of enterprise and SharePoint with ArnoldIT.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Doctor Autonomy I Presume
December 20, 2013
HP is putting Autonomy in a pith helmet and sending them to the jungle, according to ZDNet,’s article “HP’s Earth Insights Deploys Big Data Tech Against Eco Threats.” HP has transformed big data into an ecology tool. Vertica, HP’s big data technology is helping ecologists detect risks to endangered species. The new endeavor is called Earth Insights and it is a joint venture between Conservation International-a non-governmental group. Earth Insights speeds up the analysis of environmental data with the addition of being in real-time and with better accuracy.
HP is also using this opportunity to show off its product line and its applications for different fields. The company is proving that big data is not only reserved for the retail and business sectors, but science can take advantage of its potential as well. The entire project uses Vertica, Hadoop, and Autonomy IDOL to analyze the 1.4 million photos, climate measurements, and three terabytes of biodiversity information from cameras and climate sensors.
“The results of the analytics will be shared with protected area managers, as well as with governments, academic institutions, non-governmental bodies and the private sector, so that they can act to protect threatened wildlife and develop policies to address threats to habitats. According to the company, the project is already yielding new information indicating declines in a significant number of the species monitored.”
Technology is seen as an opposing force to nature, but in this case technology is being used to preserve nature. It reminds me of how a Brazilian tribe used Google and an Android phone to save their home in the Amazon.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Grabbing onto a Partnership
December 20, 2013
Partnerships develop when companies each possess a strength and then combine forces to build a beneficial relationship. The CogBlog, Cognition’s Semantic NLP Blog, announced a new relationship in the post, “Cognition To Power Grabbit’s Online Recommendation Engine.” Cognition is a leading name in semantic analysis and language process and Grabbit is the developer of a cloud-hosted suite of Web services. Together they have formed a strategic partnership that will combine Cognition’s natural language processing technology with Grabbit’s patent-pending system for making online recommendations of products, content, and people. The idea behind pairing the two technologies is that the semantic software would analyze social media content and then Grabbit’s software would then make product recommendations based on the data.
The article states:
“Cognition provides a powerful set of semantic tools to power Grabbit’s new web services. The scope of Cognition’s Semantic Map is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English, and includes more than ten million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions. The Map encompasses over 540,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings); 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings); 8,000 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme; and 510,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language. Cognition’s lexical resources encode a wealth of semantic, morphological and syntactic information about the words contained within documents and their relationships to each other. These resources were created, codified and reviewed by lexicographers and linguists over a span of more than 25 years.”
Why do I get the feeling that online shopping is going to get even more complicated? Personal qualms aside, Cognition and Grabbit are not the first companies that come to mind when it comes to social media analytics and e-commerce. This partnership is not the first endeavor to cash in on Internet sales.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Attensity May Be on the Rise Again
December 20, 2013
Attensity is a name that comes to mind when organizations need to track social analytics for customer relationship management. The company has not been receiving positive PR in the past year, but when we recently visited Attensity’s management Web page. We noticed that the page had a few new faces with impressive resumes. Will these new board members take the company out of the red and place them on the right path?
Let us review each person. Howard Lau joined Attensity in January 2013, says his LinkedIn page, and he has twenty-five years in the business software sector. He used to be an executive at SAP Labs and SAP Ventures and East Gate Capital. He is now Attensity’s CEO and Chairman. Lau is a venture capitalist and has turned a profit four times the investor’s original investment. He is knowledgeable and has the right experience to turn Attensity around. He checks out well.
Thomas Dreikauss is the general manager of Attensity GmbH in Europe and has the large responsibility of running business development across Western Europe. He has worked in sales management and marketing enterprise software for over twenty years. Derikauss has proven he can build strong teams and helping companies expand beyond a small startup. He worked at Inxight Software GmbH, Xerox PARC, and Business Objects. He was probably brought onto the team, because he is noted to help companies grow when times are tough. Another good apple.
The Chief Financial Officer Frank Brown is next:
“Frank brings over 25 years of experience in the technology and finance industries. Prior to Attensity, he has worked with a number of leading companies in the software, communications, and semiconductor industries, at the executive and board level, to chart corporate strategy and manage internal operations. Frank’s experience includes positions with IBM Corporation, Andersen Consulting, Oracle Corporation and Lehman Brothers. Frank’s background also includes a number of years in the investment banking and venture capital industries. His successful track record as a venture capitalist includes investments across the technology and healthcare sectors. As the founder of Amber Ventures, Frank has worked as a senior finance executive in a variety of privately held technology companies guiding their activities in areas such as budgeting, accounting, fundraising and mergers and acquisitions. Frank received his M.B.A. from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.S. in Decision Sciences, Finance and Accounting.”
Brown has the important duty of bringing in revenue and rerouting financial plans. It is a difficult position to be in, especially if the company is trying to reinvent itself. Experience and openness to new ideas is the route Attensity should rely on as the company tries to get back on track. It will be a long, winding path up the mountain. These three will act as the climbing poles to keep Attensity from falling.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Fulcrum Technologies Report Available: A New Xenky Profile
December 19, 2013
The Xenky Web site has published a new enterprise search vendor profile about Fulcrum Technologies, a company founded in Ottawa, Canada. For 10 minutes, you can flash back to 1983 when Fulcrum Technologies offered a comprehensive solution to organization-wide information retrieval. Then you can fast forward to the present because Fulcrum’s software continues to influence findability solutions in the market today. That’s a mind boggling span of 30 years. Stated another way, Fulcrum’s technology is aging. But how well?
Many of the concepts marketed as innovation by vendors in 2013 are quite similar and in some case almost identical to what Ful/Text and Search Server embodied. Want federated search? Fulcrum offered it. Need automated indexing? Fulcrum delivered. Require a knowledge centric system? Fulcrum said it had a solution for “intellectual assets.”
The journey of Fulcrum from start up to a unit of OpenText is instructive as well. The company had a number of owners before being acquired by Datamat, then PCDocs, next Hummingbird, and finally OpenText.
Was the company generating significant cash? Did it have a secret technology sauce protected by patents, successful deployments, and a cadre of loyal partners? Today’s enterprise search companies are following a technical and financial trail walked by Fulcrum.
This profile snapshots the company’s trajectory from its founding to its becoming a property of OpenText. You can access the free profile on the Xenky vendor profile page. Other free search vendor profiles are available for:
- Convera
- Delphes
- Dieselpoint
- Entopia
- Fulcrum Technologies
- SchemaLogic
- Siderean
- Verity.
These case studies provide insight into the challenges search vendors have faced in the past. Scanning several profiles reveals the similarity among systems. Please, read the disclaimer for these free, “historical” reports. Within limit, the information in the 15 to 25 reports may help answer the questions:
- “Are search systems able to deliver a payback to their customers?”
- “Have marketers created expectations software cannot meet?”
- “Has information retrieval innovation for the enterprise stalled?”
The information is provided by Arnold Information Technology without charge. You may use the report’s content for your personal learning. Any other use requires prior written permission from ArnoldIT.
If you want to update, correct, or comment on the profile, please, use the comments section of Beyond Search. The Xenky site is not configured for visitor input.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2013
SharePoint Predictions for 2014
December 19, 2013
SharePoint seems to be getting bigger in scope and more widespread in adoption. Turning the page into a new year provides a good excuse to reflect on the past year and predict what will happen in the next, even when it comes to technology. CMS Wire does just that in their article, “6 Predictions for SharePoint, Office 365 in 2014.”
The article begins with a prediction for content collaboration:
“SkyDrive Pro is Microsoft’s response to document sharing tools such as DropBox and Google Drive. They have put a lot of emphasis on using SkyDrive Pro with SharePoint and Office 365 to easily share documents and take them offline. Google Drive is a little further along than DropBox, but we see the real opportunity in SkyDrive Pro. With Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud, SkyDrive Pro is going to get a lot of attention and we know how Microsoft likes to take on Google.”
And while the article goes on to list several other trends to keep an eye on, this one about SkyDrive Pro may be the most important. Stephen E. Arnold, a longtime search expert and man behind ArnoldIT, has covered SkyDrive Pro and continues to keep an eye on what could be the most important new angle for SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Out of Healthcare and Into Information Management
December 19, 2013
MarkeLogic has been working on the Healthcare.gov project (not going to touch that hotbed of live wires) and according to Database Trends and Applications the company has a new deal: “Applied Relevance Introduces Information Management Application Optimized For MarkLogic 7.” Applied Relevance developed Epinomy version 7 that is specially geared towards MarkLogic 7. CEO and founder of Applied Relevance George Everitt stated that Epinomy offers an advantage due to its tables, texts, and triples. This makes Epinomy prime for big data management, because of its approach to linking and tagging information, i.e. the tables and texts and then leveraging them with triple store technology for a high-speed experience.
“ ‘The table is the structured information, and it is the traditional BI kind” of information. Text is the traditional enterprise text kind of information. MarkLogic does both of those exceptionally well,’ said Everitt. ‘The third is triples – the metadata – the glue that holds those two together. What we provide with Epinomy is a way of creating and managing taxonomies, ontologies, and other data structures that are represented in linked data so that you can apply those to both the structured and unstructured environments, and get value from both of them using the triples as an underlying semantic mechanism.’ “
Information managers are given more control over their data by allowing them to build ontologies from scratch. Metadata and auto tagging will keep the data organized with quick retrieval and accurate search.
MarkLogic is mostly known in the publishing industry, which is riddled with unstructured data. The company has been gaining attention in financial services. Epinomy will give MarkLogic the boost it needs to prove that it can handle numbers as well as words.
Whitney Grace, December 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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