Old School Endeca Yields EneCom
August 27, 2015
The main idea is that an Oracle partner has used Endeca (a late 1990s chunk of technology) to build an “end to end eCommerce omni channel solution.”
I thought that’s what Endeca’s system did.
I learned:
EneCom is a robust, scalable and cost-effective eCommerce solution that integrates with 3rd party vendors including Shipping Carriers such as FedEx and UPS, Tax engine using Avalara and Credit Card Payment Gateways using Chase Paymentech, EpicPay, and WorldPay etc. EneCom is self-sufficient and can be standalone. Existing Oracle Endeca customers can further extend their Endeca investment by taking advantage of the integrations and omni-channel capabilities.
I concluded that iBiz stood up a ready to roll implementation of Endeca.
No information about cost. As I recall, Endeca was an expensive solution. iBiz, which empowers cloud commerce, may have found a way to make Endeca’s approach mesh with the real time, go go mobile world.
It strikes me that EneCom is Endeca without the time consuming, expensive consulting work required to make the computational intensive system deliver useful outputs.
Without pricing information, it is tough to tell if the solution is a viable alternative to the numerous low cost eCommerce systems available.
Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2015
OpenText: The Linear Value Chain Becomes an Ecosystem
August 27, 2015
EMC is into data lakes, wheels, and hubs.
OpenText has a different view. Navigate to “What Is a Digital Enterprise?”
The main idea is that a digital business is “empowered by digital technology.” Okay, I think that means computers, mobile devices, software. For the last 50 years I have been involved with organizations which have leased, purchased, or invented digital technology.
Is this a news flash?
The write up explains:
This means that the business engages customers and conducts business through digital channels, uses digital assets and/or capabilities, and sells digital products or services. As in the case of startups, the value proposition is keenly focusing on serving digital consumers and is enabled by digital technology. This fundamentally impacts an organization’s value chain.
But the real payoff is this statement:
The value chain of a digital business is more cyclical than it is linear.
But wait, that’s only sort of correct. The value chain is going the way of the snail darter. The Darwinian law of software and service companies is that the future is the ecosystem. Here’s a diagram which makes sense of these remarkable leaps from sequences (what a mid tier consultant calls algorithms which is equally wacky) to value chains to ecosystems.
I like the use of a circle, the interior pentagon, and lines. Very Euclidean in a somewhat four dimensional world. But, hey, Euclid is high school and reality is something else again.
I liked this closing statement:
As we move rapidly toward a Digital World, one thing is clear: information lies at the heart of innovation and disruption. No longer considered just the cost of doing business, information is instrumental in driving innovation and growth. When used the right way, information leads to greater customer satisfaction, accelerates time-to-market, helps to create new opportunities, and enables businesses to remain relevant and competitive. Information is a key strategic component for every organization today and critical to enabling transformation.
I suppose my work career which spans more than a half century in things with zeros and ones, the “rapidly” surprises me.
Perhaps OpenText will open the door to the future. With technology from Fulcrum, Information Dimensions, BRS, and many other slightly long in the tooth digital giants, OpenText may become the go to outfit for this digital stuff.
Stakeholders hope so. The revenues are creeping up but the profitability of the firm has flat lined.
Maybe the digital future thing does not deliver the bottom line impact that some senior managers are supposed to deliver. Without enough money to invest in refurbing old search technology, the future may not be too bright and shiny.
What happens if the ecosystem dies?
Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2015
A Search Engine for College Students Purchasing Textbooks
August 27, 2015
The article on Life Hacker titled TUN’s Textbook Search Engine Compares Prices from Thousands of Sellers reviews TUN, or the “Textbook Save Engine.” It’s an ongoing issue for college students that tuition and fees are only the beginning of the expenses. Textbook costs alone can skyrocket for students who have no choice but to buy the assigned books if they want to pass their classes. TUN offers students all of the options available from thousands of booksellers. The article says,
“The “Textbook Save Engine” can search by ISBN, author, or title, and you can even use the service to sell textbooks as well. According to the main search page…students who have used the service have saved over 80% on average buying textbooks. That’s a lot of savings when you normally have to spend hundreds of dollars on books every semester… TUN’s textbook search engine even scours other sites for finding and buying cheap textbooks; like Amazon, Chegg, and Abe Books.”
After typing in the book title, you get a list of editions. For example, when I entered Pride and Prejudice, which I had to read for two separate English courses, TUN listed an annotated version, several versions with different forewords (which are occasionally studied in the classroom as well) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. After you select an edition, you are brought to the results, laid out with shipping and total prices. A handy tool for students who leave themselves enough time to order their books ahead of the beginning of the class.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Yammer Improvements and Changes on the Horizon
August 27, 2015
A few years ago, Yammer was an integral part of SharePoint’s marketing campaign as they sought to persuade users that they were moving toward a focus on social. With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2016, social is still important, although it feels less forced and more natural this time around. There will be changes to Yammer and Redmond Magazine covers it in their article, “Microsoft Announces Yammer Improvements To Come While Deprecating Some Yammer SharePoint Apps.”
The article says:
“Microsoft announced this week that it is working on a more team-oriented Yammer, and it will be bringing along some mobile app improvements, too. Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade social networking application that’s part of some Office 365 subscription plans. Yammer can be used as a standalone service, but it’s also used with SharePoint Server products and SharePoint Online implementations.”
To stay current on what else may change with the release of SharePoint Server 2016, stay tuned to ArnoldIT.com. Stephen E. Arnold is an expert on search and the enterprise. His dedicated SharePoint feed is a great way to stay up to date on the latest new surrounding SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Data Vendors Don’t Understand Big Data
August 27, 2015
Sit back and absorb this article’s title for a moment: big data vendors don’t understand big data. How can IT vendors not understand one of the IT industry’s largest selling products? According to Computing, “SAP, Oracle, and HP ‘Don’t Get’ Big Data, Claims Massive Analytic Chairman” in a very bold statement.
Executive chairman and founder of the Oscar AP platform George Frangou claims that companies that like Oracle, HP, and SAP do not know how to help their customers take advantage of their big data and are more interested in getting customers hooked into their ecosystems than providing true analytical insight.
One of the reasons Frangou says this is because his Oscar AP is more “advanced” and allows users to foretell the future with various outcomes. The Oscar AP platform is part of the next round of big data called massive analytics. HP, Oracle, and SAP cannot wrap their heads around massive analytics yet, because they are more concerned with selling their product.
“Because of this, Frangou said Massive Analytic is ‘quite unashamedly following a displacement strategy to displace the incumbents because they’re not getting it.’ He added that SAP HANA, Oracle Exalytics and HP Haven are essentially the same product because they’re built on the same base code.”
Frangou went on to say that big data customers are spending more money than they need to and are getting sucked into purchasing more products in order to make their big data plans work. It appears to be a vicious cycle. Frangou said that cloud analytics are the best option for customers and to go with SAP, although still more barriers remain getting a decent cloud analytics platform off the ground.
It does not come as surprising that big data products are falling short of their promised results. A similar comparison would be the Windows OS falling well below expected desired performance expectations and users spending way too much time troubleshooting than getting their projects done.
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Insights into the Cut and Paste Coding Crowd
August 26, 2015
I read “How Developers Search for Code.” Interesting. The write up points out what I have observed. Programmers search for existing — wait for it — code.
Why write something when there are wonderful snippets to recycle. Here’s the paragraph I highlighted:
We also learn that a search session is generally just one to two minutes in length and involves just one to two queries and one to two file clicks.
Yep, very researchy. Very detailed. Very shallow. Little wonder that most software rolls out in endless waves of fixes. Good enough is the sort of sigma way.
Encouraging. Now why did that air traffic control crash happen? Where are the back ups to the data in Google’s Belgium server center? Why does that wonderful Windows 10 suck down data to mobile devices with little regard for data caps? Why does malware surface in Android apps?
Good enough: the new approach to software QA/QC.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2015
Indeed. One Can Fix Government Economic Forecasts
August 26, 2015
Big Data is magic. Big Data is revolutionary. Big Data is good consulting angle.
But Big Data is not going to fix government forecasts. I hate to rain on the parade of a distinguished academic and chief economist, but those rain drops keep a falling.
Navigate to “Economic Forecasts in the Age of Big Data.” The passage I highlighted with my sea of red ink colored marker was:
Properly used, new data sources have the potential to revolutionize economic forecasts. In the past, predictions have had to extrapolate from a few unreliable data points. In the age of Big Data, the challenge will lie in carefully filtering and analyzing large amounts of information. It will not be enough simply to gather data; in order to yield meaningful predictions, the data must be placed in an analytical framework. The Fed may have blundered in releasing its data ahead of schedule. But its mistake offers us an important opportunity. In order to improve economic predictions, economists must be encouraged to seek new sources of data and develop new forecasting models. As we learn how to harness the power of big data, our chances of predicting – and perhaps even preventing – the next recession will improve.
I am thrilled with job opening analyses in Boston, demand for rentals in San Francisco, and housing starts in Los Angeles (you know the water crisis city).
However, government economic analyses are not into reality. In Washington, DC, there is a big building adjacent the train station. It is filled with folks who do economic forecasts among other things. There are economic forecasts cranked out by lobbyists. There are super grades in Federal entities crunching numbers. The numbers get reviewed, shaped, and tweaked. Eventually the numbers emerge in a new release which may or many not be widely distributed. The government process for creating economic forecasts is institutionalized. Like an aircraft carrier, the system carries some momentum.
A person who wants to inject real time Big Data into these procedures can go through the normal process. Get involved in an allocation for an initiative. Find a way to work on a statement of work. Compete for a Big Data economic forecast project. Do the work. Have the work reviewed and taken under advisement.
End of the day: The existing system keeps on generating forecasts.
Net net: Economic forecasts from DC and other world capitals drift above real time. Rome had the same problem.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2015
How to Search the Ashley-Madison Data and Discover If You Had an Affair Too
August 26, 2015
If you haven’t heard about the affair-promoting website Ashley Madison’s data breach, you might want to crawl out from under that rock and learn about the millions of email addresses exposed by hackers to be linked to the infidelity site. In spite of claims by parent company Avid Life Media that users’ discretion was secure, and that the servers were “kind of untouchable,” as many as 37 million customers have been exposed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge number of government and military personnel have been found on the list. The article on Reuters titled Hacker’s Ashley Madison Data Dump Threatens Marriages, Reputations also mentions that the dump has divorce lawyers clicking their heels with glee at their good luck. As for the motivation of the hackers? The article explains,
“The hackers’ move to identify members of the marital cheating website appeared aimed at maximum damage to the company, which also runs websites such as Cougarlife.com andEstablishedMen.com, causing public embarrassment to its members, rather than financial gain. “Find yourself in here?,” said the group, which calls itself the Impact Team, in a statement alongside the data dump. “It was [Avid Life Media] that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you’ll get over it.”
If you would like to “find yourself” or at least check to see if any of your email addresses are part of the data dump, you are able to do so. The original data was put on the dark web, which is not easily accessible for most people. But the website Trustify lets people search for themselves and their partners to see if they were part of the scandal. The website states,
“Many people will face embarrassment, professional problems, and even divorce when their private details were exposed. Enter your email address (or the email address of your spouse) to see if your sexual preferences and other information was exposed on Ashley Madison or Adult Friend Finder. Please note that an email will be sent to this address.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that many of the email accounts registered to Ashley Madison seem to be stolen. However, the ability to search the data has already yielded some embarrassment for public officials and, of course, “family values” activist Josh Duggar. The article on the Daily Mail titled Names of 37 Million Cheating Spouses Are Leaked Online: Hackers Dump Huge Data File Revealing Clients of Adultery Website Ashley Madison- Including Bankers, UN and Vatican Staff goes into great detail about the company, the owners (married couple Noel and Amanda Biderman) and how hackers took it upon themselves to be the moral police of the internet. But the article also mentions,
“Ashley Madison’s sign-up process does not require verification of an email address to set up an account. This means addresses might have been used by others, and doesn’t prove that person used the site themselves.”
Some people are already claiming that they had never heard of Ashley Madison in spite of their emails being included in the data dump. Meanwhile, the Errata Security Blog entry titled Notes on the Ashley-Madison Dump defends the cybersecurity of Ashley Madison. The article says,
“They tokenized credit card transactions and didn’t store full credit card numbers. They hashed passwords correctly with bcrypt. They stored email addresses and passwords in separate tables, to make grabbing them (slightly) harder. Thus, this hasn’t become a massive breach of passwords and credit-card numbers that other large breaches have lead to. They deserve praise for this.”
Praise for this, if for nothing else. The impact of this data breach is still only beginning, with millions of marriages and reputations in the most immediate trouble, and the public perception of the cloud and cybersecurity close behind.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Facebook and the Young at Heart Spells Trouble for Alphabet
August 26, 2015
Poor old Google. Imagine. Hassles with Google Now. Grousing from the no fun crowd in the European Commission. A new contact lens business. Exciting stuff.
Then the Googlers read “Facebook’s New Moments App Now Automatically Creates Music Videos From Your Photos.” The idea is that one or two of the half billion Facebookers who check their status multiple times a day can make a movie video automatically.
Sounds good.
But instead of doing the professional video production thing, the video is created from the one’s shared photos.
I wonder how many of the young at heart will whip up and suck down videos of [a] children, [b] pets, [c] vacations, [d] tattoos (well, maybe not too many tattoos).
The idea is
With the update, Facebook Moments will automatically create a music video for any grouping of six or more photos. You can then tap this video in the app to customize it further by changing the included photos and selecting from about a dozen different background music options. When you’re finished making your optional edits to this video, one more tap will share the video directly to Facebook and tag the friend or friends with whom you’re already sharing those photos. The option to automatically create a video from your shared photos also makes Facebook Moments competitive with similar services like Flipagram, or those automatically created animations that Google Photos provides through its “Assistant” feature, which also helpfully builds out stories and collages.
Google may apply its Thought Vector research to the problem. The question is will Alphabet be able to spell success from its social services. Why would a grandmother care about a music video of a grandchild when there were Thought Vectors, Loon balloons, and eternal life to ponder?
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2015
SLI Share Price: Headwinds for Search Evident
August 26, 2015
I read “SLI CEO Ryan Bemoans Low Share price, Says It Should Be $2-Plus.” This is a woulda, coulda, shoulda write up. Reality seems to ignore this somewhat lame mantra.
The write up says:
SLI Systems chief executive Shaun Ryan says the company’s share price is “significantly underpriced” and could be at least four times higher based on other public software-as-a-service valuations.
The write up included this bit of information:
The company today reported a loss of $7.1 million in the year ended June 30, widening from a loss of $5.7 million a year earlier. Operating revenue increased 27 percent to $28.1 million, in line with the $28 million guidance given in April, when it flagged that second-half sales would be lower than expected. Annualized recurring revenue (ARR), its preferred financial measure based on forward subscription revenue, rose 39 percent to $34.6 million.
SLI says its system
… helps you increase e-commerce revenue by connecting your online and mobile shoppers with the products they’re most likely to buy. SLI solutions include SaaS-based learning search, navigation, merchandising, mobile, recommendations and user-generated SEO.
Other publicly trade search vendors are struggling with their financial performance too. For example, Sprylogics, a Canadian vendor, sees it shares trading at $0.33. Lexmark shares are at $28 and change.
Search is a tough niche as Hewlett Packard and IBM are learning.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2015
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