Metalogix Shares SharePoint Best of Breed
January 13, 2014
Many companies specialize in helping organizations make the most of their SharePoint deployments. SharePoint is simply too complicated for most organizations to do well with it out-of-the-box. Metalogix has decided upon its list of most successful SharePoint solution partners and releases it in the article, “Metalogix Launches Best of Breed Showcase with Leading SharePoint Industry Partners.”
The press release begins:
“Today, Metalogix announced the roll out of the Metalogix Best of Breed Showcase. Bringing together top SharePoint solution and technology partners and industry influencers, the Best of Breed Showcase is designed to drive innovation and inspire high quality SharePoint deployments. The Best of Breed Showcase will create expanded opportunities for industry collaboration through leading edge knowledge sharing forums and recognition of the SharePoint ecosystem’s most inventive solutions.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and the brains behind ArnoldIT.com. He often covers SharePoint with all of its ups and downs. One consistent finding of Arnold’s is that enterprises do better with a customized solution, and for those using SharePoint that often means an appropriate add-on.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Sales Pitch for HP IDOL
January 12, 2014
Conceptual search allows users to search by concepts and ideas within information rather than basic keywords and phrases. Great idea, except that that the idea of conceptual search has been around since 1999. HP is touting it as a entirely brand new idea in the article, “Analytics For Human Information: Optimize Information Categorization With HP IDOL” posted on its own Web site. Rather than break directly into the “new” conceptual search, we are given the even better glittery term “categorization.” HP IDOL, using ExploreCloud-an SaaS solution for analytics and sights, offers an auto-categorization feature marked as a time saver and productive tool.
HP describes it as a magic tool:
“Powered by HP IDOL, ExploreCloud helps you uncover insights across all channels: web, mobile, social media, email, contact center, database, and storefront, so that you can organize and quantify content in a consistent, objective manner, resulting in data that is more accessible and consistent. And you can maintain existing legacy taxonomies and/or enrich them with contextual understanding. When you go beyond the limitations of what keywords can help you do, your whole world opens up. You can also discover the “unknown unknowns,” or topics you did not know to look for in the first place.”
The article stresses that regular keyword searching is far from abandoned, but its limitations are stressed. Keyword search’s weaknesses are addressed to the point of stating the obvious, and then it turns into a sales pitch for HP IDOL. Little is said about what exactly HP IDOL can do, other than organize data. HP, please tell us something we do not know.
Whitney Grace, January 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Webinar Adds Value to Data
January 11, 2014
Connotate is offering a webinar called, “Big Data: The Portal To New Value Propositions.” The webinar summary explains what most big data people already know: that with all the new data available, there are new ways to cash in. The summary continues with that people generate data everyday with everything they do on the Internet and that companies have been collecting this information for years. Did you also know that as well as a physical identity that people also have a virtual identity? This is very basic knowledge here. Finally the summary gets to the point about how business value propositions will supply new opportunities, but also leads to possible risks.
After the summary, there is a list of topics that will be covered in the webinar:
· “Review the process of creating big data-based value propositions and illustrate many examples in science and health, finance, publishing and advertising.
· Explore which companies are successful, which are not and why.
· Review the mechanics: How to use unstructured content and combine it with structured data.
· Focus on data extraction, the “curation” process, the organization of value-based schemas and analytics.
· Analyze the ultimate delivery of value propositions that rest on the unique combination of unique data sets responding to a specific need.”
Big data has been around long enough that there should be less of a focus on how the data is gathered and more on the importance of value propositions. Value propositions demonstrate how the data can yield the results and how they can be used. Data value debates have been going on for awhile, especially on LinkedIn. If Connotate and Outsell know how to turn data into dollars, advertise that instead of repeating big data specs.
Whitney Grace, January 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
More Watson Nuggets
January 10, 2014
Fast Company published “IBM’s Watson For Business: The $1 Billion Siri Slayer.” The write offers some nuggets of information that convert Watson from search system into the next Apple or Google. Frankly I find this notion somewhat amusing.
The story reports this interesting assertion, “IBM wants to transform Watson into a Siri for business.” Quite an analogy.
I also noted these items:
- Stephen Gold is the vice president of IBM Watson Solutions
- Watson Discovery Advisor will be a product/service for publishing, education, and health care
- Watson Analytics Advisor appears to be an interactive analytics solution
- An ecosystem will be built around the Watson Application Programming Interface and “the Watson headquarters will also include space for a tech incubator for startups building Watson-based apps”
- Watson will be deployed on Softlayer, an IBM cloud computing service. Apparently some eager Watson prospects have an appetite for Softlayer’s delivering Watson.
I marked a quote to note from Mr. Gold and Fast Company:
Watson for Business is “one of the top innovations in IBM’s history” and it could even be the biggest IBM innovation since the IBM PC.
IBM seems to have made a different executive available to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. My hunch is that the cheerleading will continue for a while.
Meanwhile where’s the online demonstration of Watson’s functionality? I want to see how the system compares to Hewlett Packard’s Autonomy technology, check out the visualizations to see if they are different from IBM i2’s, and figure out if the analytics are recycled SPSS functions or something different.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2014
Connexica Heads to South Africa
January 10, 2014
Traveling around the Cape of Good Hope can be tricky business, but Connexica, a software company based in Staffordshire, England, plans on opening an office in South Africa. According to Midlands Business News in the article, “Staffordshire Based Connexica Expand Into South Africa” the business move is the result of a strategic partnership with Allard Verster Group.
Allard Verster Group specializes in business consulting and solutions and the partnership between the two companies will give Allard the ability to sell Connexica’s Business Analytics Software CXAIR in South Africa. CXAIR gives its users high-speed access to data with interactive diagrams.
Allard Verster Group already has an established client base in several sectors, including mining, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, and local government. The partnership will allow Connexica to reach a new range of clientele. Both companies are excited about the venture and the new opportunities it presents:
“Head of Business Development Greg Richards says of the agreement ‘We are delighted to announce this partnership with the Allard Verster Group and I am particularly excited about CXAIR moving into a new territory and see real opportunity for CXAIR within the South African and wider African market.’
Craig Verster, Executive Director at Allard Verster Group commented: ‘Our partnership with Connexica significantly enhances our ability to deliver powerful search, business Intelligence and data analysis’ productivity solutions and services to business users. It validates our strategy to co-innovate with our partners to deliver measurable value to our clients.’ ”
Good news for Connexica and Allard Verster Group. Strategic partnerships are one of the best ways to drum up new business as well as expand a product’s market reach.
Whitney Grace, January 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data 2013 Wrapup
January 10, 2014
2013 was the year that big data became big business, says Alex Handy in his San Diego Times article, “Big Data 2013: Another Big Year.” Handy explains that big data made the transformation when enterprises deployed Hadoop in production environments and NoSQL people spread data around on servers. These two combined situations resulted in disseminating massive amounts of data and employing enterprise systems to manage the information.
Hadoop 2.0 was the key player in big data getting bigger, because the software went from needing an experienced user to handle it to a more general-purpose usage along with map/reduce as the batch processing method. Hadoop was not the only item that helped make big data grow. Many other projects and software had a hand in making big data a burgeoning market. The one most comparable to Hadoop 2.0 was NoSQL databases:
“NoSQL databases continued to gain traction thanks to a never-ending need to spread data around the globe in a highly available and consistent form. To that end, a number of new transactional databases, some calling themselves “New SQLs,” cropped up this past year. NuoDB, FoundationDB and VoltDB all brought databases to market in 2013 that offered transactional support based on the ideas and techniques shown in the Google Spanner paper.”
The established NoSQL names: DataStax, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Crouchbase, however, squabbled over asserting their dominance in the market. The new year looks to be another big data year and the article implies that Basho, Sqrrl, and Hortonworks are the names to keep an eye out for. At this point in the big data game, everything needs to be watched out for.
Whitney Grace, January 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Another Security Breach this Time Connected to Metadata
January 10, 2014
When Netflix first launched I read an article about how everyone’s individual movie tastes are different. There are not any two alike and Netflix created an algorithm that managed to track each user’s queue down to the individual. It was scary and amazing at the same time. Netflix eventually decided to can the algorithm (or at least they told us), but it still leaves a thought that small traces of metadata can lead to you. The Threat Post, a Web site that tracks Internet security threats, reported on how “Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names Is Simple.”
A claim has been made that user phone data anonymously generated cannot be tracked back to an individual. Stanford Researchers proved otherwise. The team started the Metaphone program that collects data from volunteers with Android phones. The project’s main point was to collect calls, text messages, and social network information for the Stanford Security Lab to connect metadata and surveillance. They selected 5,000 random numbers and were able to match 27% of the them using Web sites people user everyday.
The article states:
“ ‘What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, and then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73,’ said Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler in a blog post explaining the results.”
The article also points out that if money was not a problem, then the results would be even more accurate. The Stanford Researchers users a cheap data aggregator instead and accurately matched 91 out of 100 numbers. Data is not as protected or as anonymous as we thought. People are willing to share their whole lives on social media, but when security is mentioned they go bonkers over an issue like this? It is still a scary thought, but where is the line drawn over willing shared information and privacy?
Whitney Grace, January 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Trends of 2013
January 10, 2014
SharePoint had a big year in 2013 as users settled in to their SharePoint 2013 deployments. In addition, Microsoft made a few significant announcements relating to the software. CMSWire covers all of the biggest SharePoint news in their article, “A Look Back: Yammer, Office 365, Mobile Dominate SharePoint in 2013.”
The article begins:
“Everyone that has had anything to do with SharePoint over the year has his own SharePoint story. With such a vast platform used in so many ways, everyone has something he loves and something he hates. The only thing everyone agrees on is to disagree. For my money, SharePoint this year was characterized by SharePoint and Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 and Mobile SharePoint.”
Stephen E. Arnold, a longtime leader in search, including enterprise, is a frequent contributor to the ongoing SharePoint discussion. His SharePoint coverage on ArnoldIT.com is also reflective of the trends mentioned above. Along with the points in which Arnold is in agreement with the CMSWire article, he has also found that 2013 was a year in which many large SharePoint deployments turned to add-ons and third-party solutions in order to make SharePoint infrastructure work.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The IBM Watson PR Blitz Continues
January 9, 2014
Content marketing is alive and well at IBM. I read two Watson related stories this morning. Let’s look at each and see if there are hints about how IBM will generate $10 billion in revenue from the game show winning Watson information system.
The New York Times
“IBM Is Betting Watson Can Earn Its Keep” appears on page B 9 of the hard copy which arrives in Harrod’s Creek most days. A digital instance of this Quentin Hardy write up may be online at http://nyti.ms/1krYgfx. If not, contact a Google Penguin for guidance.
The write up contains a quote to note:
Virginia M. Rometty, CEO of IBM: Watson does more than find the needle in the haystack. It understands the haystack. It understands concepts.
The best haystack quote I have heard came from Matt Kohl, student of Gerald Salton and founder of Personal Library Software. Dr. Kohl pointed out that that haystacks involve needles, multiple haystacks and multiple needles, and other nuances that make clear how difficult locating information can be.
The quote attributed to Ms. Rometty also nods to Autonomy’s marketing. Autonomy, since 1996, emphasized that one of the core functions of the Bayesian-Shannon-Laplace-Volterra method was identifying concepts automatically. Are IBM and arch rival Hewlett Packard using the same 18 year old marketing lingo? If so, I wonder how that will play out against the real-life struggles HP seems to be experiencing in the information retrieval sector.
There are several other interesting points in the content marketing-style article:
- IBM is “giving Watson $1 billion and a nice office.” I wonder if the nuance of “giving” is better than “investing.”
- $100 million will be allocated “for venture investments related to Watson’s so-called data analysis and recommendation technology.” One hopes that IBM’s future acquisitions deliver value. IBM already owns iPhrase, a “smart search system,” some of Dr. Ramanathan Guha’s semantic technology, Vivisimo, and the text processing component of SPSS called Clementine. That’s a lot of in hand technology, but IBM wants to buy more. What are the costs of integration?
- IBM has to figure out how to “cohere” with other IBM initiatives. Is Cognos now part of Watson? What happens to the IBM Almaden research flowing from Web Fountain and similar initiatives? What is the role of Lucene, which I heard is the plumbing of Watson?
The IBM write up will get wide pick up, but the article strikes me as raising some serious questions about Watson initiative. There may be 750 eager developers wanting to write applications for Watson. I am waiting for an Internet accessible demonstration against a live data set.
The Wall Street Journal, Round 2, January 9, 2014
The day after running “IBM Struggles to turn Watson into Big Business”, the real news outfit ran a second story called “IBM Set to Expand Watson’s Reach.” I saw this on page B2 of the hard copy that arrived in Harrod’s Creek this morning. Progress. There was no WSJ delivery on January 6 and January 7 because it was too cold. You may be able to locate a digital version of the story at http://on.wsj.com/1ikQa3X. (Same Penguin advice applies if the article is not available online.)
This January 9, 2014, story includes a quote to note:
Michael Rhodin, IBM senior vice president, Watson unit: We are now moving into more of a rapid expansion phase. We’ve made incredible progress. There is lots more to do. We would not be pursuing it if we did not think think had big commercial potential.
We then learn that by 2018, Watson will generate $1 billion per year. Autonomy was founded in 1996 and at the time of its purchase by Hewlett Packard, the company reported revenue in the $800 million range. IBM wants to generate more revenue from search in less time than Autonomy. No other enterprise search and content processing vendor has been able to match Autonomy’s performance. In fact, Autonomy’s rapid growth after 2004 was due in part to acquisitions. Autonomy paid about $500 million for Verity and IBM’s $100 million for investments may not buy much in a search sector that has consolidated. Oracle paid about $1 billion for Endeca which generated about $130 million a year in 2011.
Net Net
Watson has better PR than most of the search and content processing companies I track. How many people at the Watson unit pay attention to SRCH2, Open Search Server, Sphinx Search, SearchDaimon, the Dassault Cloud 360 system, and the dozens and dozens of other companies pitching information retrieval solutions.
I would wager that the goals for Watson are unachievable in the time frame outlined. The ability of a large company to blast past Autonomy’s revenue benchmark will require agility, flexibility, price wizardry, and a product that delivers verifiable value.
As the second Wall Street Journal points out, “IBM is looking to revive growth after six straight quarters of revenue declines.”
IBM may be better at content marketing than hitting the revenue targets for Watson at the same time Hewlett Packard is trying to generate massive revenues from the Autonomy technology. Will Google sit on its hands as IBM and HP scoop up the enterprise deals? What about Amazon? Its search system is a so-so offering, but it can offer some sugar treats to organizations looking to kick tires with reduced risk.
Many organizations are downloading open source search and data management systems. These are good enough when smart software is still a work in progress. With 2,000 people working on Watson, the trajectory of this solution will be interesting to follow.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2014
Distraction Addiction: Welcoming Predictive Search Systems
January 9, 2014
The article on Business Insider titled Here’s How Many Times People Switch Devices In a Single Hour provides insight into the studies being undertaken by both Google and Facebook into following users from device to device. They need to demonstrate to advertisers that the ad one user saw on his laptop at work later caused him to make a purchase from his smartphone. The article states
“A new study from the British unit of advertising buyer OMD shows just how massively important this cross-device tracking has become to monitoring a given consumer’s behavior.
In looking at the behavior of 200 Brits during one evening, OMD found that the average person shifted his attention between his smartphone, tablet, and laptop a staggering 21 times in one hour.”
This study’s findings may not come as huge surprise. An article on Salon titled How Baby Boomers Screwed Their Kids and Created Millennial Impatience argues that the Generation Y is the most distracted and impatient batch of people yet. The article contends,
“According to a study at Northwestern University, the number of children and young people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shot up 66 percent between 2000 and 2010. Why the sudden and huge spike in a frontal lobe dysfunction over the course of a decade… What I believe is likely happening, however, is that more young people are developing an addiction to distraction. An entire generation has become addicted to the dopamine-producing effects of text messages, e-mails and other online activities.”
This “addiction to distraction” is often held up by Gen Y’ers as an ability to “multi-task”. But what does it mean to be someone unable to focus? In Buddhism there is the belief that if you are doing more than one focused task, you are not truly alive.
With telework, the workplace is now the world.
We have all succumbed at one time or another to the call of checking our e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter account, but when we are doing it so often that it takes over our concentration, what have our lives become? There is a wide gap between flitting from these exciting distractions and actually gaining some foothold of understanding. And the more we do jump back and forth between tasks, the less likely it becomes that any knowledge is created or stored. The Salon article paints a bleak picture, starting off with the dark Philip Larkin poem “This Be the Verse” (it is hardly “High Windows”) and including this dreary image of the future,
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