NTENT Has a New CEO
September 29, 2015
NTENT is a leading natural language processing and semantic search company, that owns the Convera technology, and according to Business Wire Dan Stickel was hired as the new CEO, says “NTENT Appoints Dan Stickel As New CEO.” NTENT is focused on expanding the company with AltaVista and Google. Using Stickel’s experience, NTENT has big plans and is sure that Stickel will lead the company to success.
“CEO, Stickel’s first objective will be to prioritize NTENT’s planned expansion along geographic, market and technology dimensions. ‘After spending significant time with NTENT’s Board, management team and front-line employees, I’m excited by the company’s opportunities and by the foundation that’s already been laid in both traditional web and newer mobile capabilities. NTENT has clearly built some world-class technology, and is now scaling that out with customers and partners.’”
In his past positions as CEO at Metaforic and Webtrends s well as head of the enterprise business at AltaVista and software business at Macrovision, Stickel has transitioned companies to become the leaders in their respective industries.
The demand for natural language processing software and incorporating it into semantic search is one of the biggest IT trends at the moment. The field is demanding innovation and NTENT believes Stickel will guide them.
Whitney Grace, September 29, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Business Intelligence: A Magical Insight Machine?
September 28, 2015
I found “Thinking Outside the Big Data Black Box: Why BI Isn’t a Magical Insight Machine” interesting. The main point of the write up is that vendors well analytics platforms. The licensees learn that set up, tuning, expertise are required to make these often expensive systems deliver useful outputs.
The write up states:
Big data, or indeed any data, may indeed hold huge value, but it’s often looked at in the wrong way. When we are looking at data – collected from different sources, to address different motivations, with an ever-changing context – we can’t fast track every correlation into an actionable insight. We have to understand where the data comes from, the factors limiting its reliability, its consistency when applied across different sub-groups, and where biases may be lurking. We need to carefully interrogate any correlation, before we can understand whether it represents a truth in the real world.
Bummer. Smart software, flashy Powerpoints, and examples of Hollywood style graphics make data work fun, interesting, game like, right?
Not without effort.
The write up points out:
A straightforward analysis of historical data will spot factors that consistently cause cost overruns. But more sophisticated techniques and a bit of intuition can go much further – for example you may find short planning time is not generally correlated with cost overruns, but it is more strongly correlated with overruns in projects over a certain size. Most importantly, you need to understand why these relationships exist. If one factor consistently reduces costs, can you be confident it will continue to do so in a new market where conditions are different? If you don’t understand your data you can’t make such predictions.
After reading the article, I was shocked. I thought that today’s nifty systems eliminated the requirement to understand data, understand the mathematical option, and provide ready to use outputs.
Disappointed. I thought the quip about business intelligence as an oxymoron was a cheap shot.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2015
Learn about Google via a Click Generating Listicle
September 28, 2015
Desperate for clicks on your Web site. Follow the lead of “17 things You Didn’t Know about Google.” The idea is simple. Cook up a catchy title like “17 Things,” relate the title to the number of years Google has been in business, and break up a list into individual Web pages. Listicle magic.
I flipped through this article to see what gems about Google the authors mined from the wealth of Alphabet Google content available via a Google search.
Here are three “things” I highlighted as representative of the intellectual depth of the listicle.
- Google used to be called Backrub. Alas, there is no mention of the influences upon the founder. Clever or an oversight?
- Google is a derivative of a mathematical term. Omitted is the misspelling that yielded Google. Alphabets can be confusing.
- Google is scanning books. I wonder if the authors and publishers know about this?
Fill your mind. Absorb the other 14 facts. Be enriched.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2015
A Modest Proposal: Universal Internet Access and a Chief Digital Officer in Every Organization
September 28, 2015
Facebook supports universal Internet access. Support is not enough from one or two outfits. Facebook wants the United Nations to make universal Internet access a priority.
Navigate to “Mark Zuckerberg Addresses the UN, Declaring Universal Internet Access a Global Priority.” I wonder if peace keeping, food, education, and other priorities of the United Nation will be down prioritized or de-prioritized. If I were hoping for UN food assistance, I would definitely want to be able to check my Facebook. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is obviously wrong. At the top, Facebook.
I also noted this article, “IT Still Doesn’t Understand Its Role in Society.” The author is a self described “IT leader.” The point is, I think:
It struck me, when I opened this September’s edition, just how much things have moved on. This month gives much more space to the changing role of IT and its part in business leadership. That of course lies at the heart of the debate about CIOs and CDOs – the former seeming inextricably constrained by operational IT matters, whether insourced or outsourced, and the latter filling the vacuum created by misalignment between IT activity and business priority. Everyone seems agreed that the role of a CDO is not about the technology. It is about people and process. But it cannot operate without a fundamental understanding about the opportunity that technology offers, and therefore CDOs must work closely with IT professionals.
The word choice is well matched with the imperative to make technology become the source for wild and crazy assertions. I like the use of the acronyms CIO and CDO. I am not sure what a CDO is, but that is not important. The precision of insourced and outsourced, where the outsourcing thing fills “the vacuum created by misalignment between IT activity and business priority.”
Okay, the folks running the business are not exactly sure what’s up with IT. If a senior manager tuned in to Facebook’s remarks about universal Internet access, there might be some furrowed brows.
What’s the fix?
The answer is a new job position at companies. The CDO. (My hunch is that this acronym means “chief digital officer.”) When revenues are stressed, most senior managers will gladly add to the organization’s headcount to get a CDO on the team.
I highlighted this passage:
So we need clever technical specialists, but we also need IT professionals who can bridge the gap between technology opportunity and the benefits that technology can bring society. That is why the goal of BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT – is “to make IT good for society”. That should be the role of IT professionals. This means that IT professionals need to understand the impact of technology, positive and negative, in the way systems and IT tools are designed. It means IT has a significant part to play in the debate about privacy and trust emerging from IT changes. It means we have a part to play in the way systems are designed to benefit society, not just to make profit. And it means IT is a creative, human discipline, not just a scientific and engineering profession.
Okay. But what about the Facebook suggestion to make Internet access universal. Will checking the Facebook obviate hunger and disease? Will information technology move beyond profit to benefiting society.
What’s at stake here? My hunch the focus for Facebook thing and the self appointed expert’s CDO recommendation has more to do with money and boosting the notion of the importance of technology in the modern world.
Was Maslow incorrect? Is Facebook connectivity more important than food? Are companies in need of more headcount in order to make headway in the datasphere?
Nope. Why not sit back and let the Alphabet Google thing do the job? Some big thinkers want governments to be more like Google. No Facebook. No information technology intermediaries. Why search for information when a commercial enterprise and self appointed experts know best what folks like me want?
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2015
Accidental and On-Purpose Insider Threats in Federal Agencies Still Raging
September 28, 2015
The article on Eweek titled Insider Threats a Major Security Issue for Federal Agencies looks at the recent results of a MeriTalk survey investigating federal response to insider threats through interviewing federal IT managers. The results are shocking, with almost 30% of agencies acknowledging data lost to an insider threat in the last year and half of respondents claiming that unauthorized personnel commonly fail to observe protocols. Even worse, most agencies have no tracking in place to recognize what a staffer may have seen or shared, making them virtually incapable of following up on risky behavior in their employees. The article says,
“The most startling finding from the survey is the fact that 45 percent of agencies say they’ve been a target of an attack – malicious or unintentional – yet 50 percent still say employees do not follow all the protocols in place,” Steve O’Keeffe, founder of MeriTalk…”There is also a lack of agreement on the best solution. Frequent, hands-on employee training is the key to preventing these incidents, as well as accountability. However, we are all human and people make mistakes.”
O’Keefe recommends the immediate and comprehensive adoption of better encryption and two-factor authentication to address the issue. But perhaps equally important is continuously updated training, and ongoing training, to avoid the common accidental insider threats.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 28, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Help Wanted: Chief Marketing Technology Officer
September 28, 2015
A new, indispensable position for companies is the chief technology officer or the chief information officer. Their primary responsibilities are to manage the IT department, implement new ways to manage information, and/or develop software as needed. There is a new position that companies will be creating in the future and the title is chief marketing technology officer, says Live Mint in “Make Way CIOS, CMOS: Here Comes The CMTO.”
Formerly the marketing and IT departments never mixed, except for the occasional social media collaboration. Marketers are increasing their reliance on technology to understand their customers and it goes far beyond social media. Marketers need to be aware of the growing trends in mobile shopping and search, digital analytics, gamification, online communities, and the power of user-generated content.
“The CMO’s role will graduate to CMTO, a marketer with considerable knowledge of technology. The CMTO, according to Nasscom, will not only conceptualize but also build solutions and lay down the technical and commercial specifications while working alongside the IT team on vendor selection.”
It is not enough to know how to market a product or promote an organization. Marketers need to be able to engage with technology and understand how to implement to attract modern customers and increase sales. In other words, evolving the current marketing position with a new buzzword.
Whitney Grace, September 28, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Dream, the Fantasy: Government More Like the Alphabet Google Thing
September 27, 2015
I read in my dead tree edition of the New York Times “”Making Government Work More Like Google.” A version of this story is / was online at “A Better Government, One Tweak at a Time.” Gentle reader, you may have to pay to access this chunk of “real” journalistic content.
The premise of the write up is that Google knows how to do stuff. The lead example is the Google.com splash page: Clean, simple, ad free, etc.
The article snags the notion that I think emerged from the Ivory Tower at the University of Chicago. The idea manifested money in the form of the best selling “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.”
Make little changes, and big things can happen. The notion is, according to my ageing memory, part of the Butterfly Effect. Yes, your favorite mathematician Edward Lorenz.
The core idea is that government needs to do more tweaking and nudging. Big things will happen. Maybe not what the whiz kids expect, but something great will definitely, eventually happen, maybe.
Here’s the passage which warranted a big circle:
the big idea is simpler: It’s not about knowing how to do better, it’s about testing what works. Experiment relentlessly, keep what works, and discard what doesn’t. Following this recipe may yield a government that’s just like Google: clear, user-friendly and unflinchingly effective.
A few observations:
- Alphabet Google is another minor tweak at what used to be Google. Tweak? Yep, no big deal. Focus the legal matters at the new unit and move forward with Loon balloons and solving death. Working well I assume.
- The tweaks at Google have not resulted in shifting the firm’s revenues from almost complete dependence on online advertising. Sure, the business model is still pumping out cash, but after 15 years of tweaks, maybe there could be a couple of other revenue streams?
- Lots of tweaks in the social media space at the Alphabet Google thing have done little to make Google a challenger to Facebook. Facebook is doing its same old, same old. But if the tweak thing worked, wouldn’t Orkut have blasted Facebook out of the water as it improved with each nudge of Google’s social media offerings?
Stepping back, the idea that the US government, or any government for that matter, can continuously “improve” like Alphabet Google is interesting.
I assume that the momentum of centuries old bureaucracies will respond to a nudge. The idea is similar to that of pushing an asteroid heading toward earth so the ice ball does not obliterate a chunk of real estate. Great idea.
I am confident that a government working like Google can make this work. Project Runway comes to the procurement procedures of the US, French, or Brazilian government.
Nudge away. A-B test a lot. Rinse. Repeat. Tweak. Etc.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2015
A New Wave of Old School BI Outfits Are Agile, Maybe Juicy
September 27, 2015
The mid tier outfit Forrester has released another report about enterprise business intelligence platforms” for the third quarter of 2015. These reports cost about $2,500, so you know the information is red hot, spot in, and objective. Always objective. in the write up “The Forrester Wave: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms 2015”, the report is described as “juicy.” Imagine. Juicy applied to IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Let me refresh your memory of juicy’s official definition:
1: having much juice : succulent
2: rewarding or profitable especially financially : fat <juicy contract> <a juicy dramatic role>
3a : rich in interest : colorful <juicy details>
b : sensational, racy <a juicy scandal>
c : full of vitality : lusty
I am not sure mid tier consulting firms’ reports are “rewarding or profitable especially financially” for the reader. At a couple of thousand per authorized copy of the report, the mid tier firms are likely to be drenched in juiciness. Will this report be lusty, sensational, colorful, and succulent? Nah. This is marketing pulp, gentle reader.
Which are the companies which make the cut? According to this write up, there are a baker’s dozen of agile, BI vendors:
- Birst
- GoodData
- IBM
- Information Builders
- Microsoft
- MicroStrategy
- Oracle
- Panorama Software
- Qlik
- SAP
- SAS
- Tableau Software
- TIBCO Software.
Scanning this list, I wonder how “agile” IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAS really are. I know that TIBCO acquired some nifty technology for its analytics functions, and that the founders of Spotfire have moved on to even more interesting analytics at their new company, funded in part by Google and In-Q-Tel. The other firms are ones which have run around the BI bases for years and may have a touch of arthritis; for instance, Information Builders which kicked off its career 1975. Qlik was founded in 1993. MicroStrategy flipped on its lights in 1989 and spawned at least one outfit (Clarabridge) which strikes me as slightly more agile than the mother ship. Tableau, now a publicly traded outfit, hung out its shingle in 2003.
GoodData may be the most spry among this group, not because it was founded in 2007, but because the firm landed another $25 million in funding in 2014.
According to the blurb about the report, each of these companies are agile because of several special features each of these vendors offer their customers. These characteristics are:
First, these 13 vendors’ products allow their business users to be self sufficient. I am not sure I agree, that SAS stuff requires a person to be SAS-sy, which means able to navigate the companies’ programming methods with some skill. IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle provide many different ways to skin the business intelligence cat. In my opinion, these companies’ business intelligence technology require that the business user have the equivalent of a fighter jet maintenance crew to assist them on the flights into analysis and visualization.
Second, each company generates knock out visualizations. My thought is that for zippy visualizations, more specialized tools are required. The companies highlighted in this report can deliver slides and graphs which are niftier than those in Excel, but far short of the Hollywood style outputs which come from Palantir and Recorded Future, among other firms not included in the agile list.
Third, each of the 13 companies offers its licensees and customers options and additional features. This is definitely a must have function. Most of the firms in the list of agile BI companies sells services. Some have partners, lots of partners. The business model may be less to be agile and more to sell billable work, but that’s okay. I am not sure inking a six figure services contract delivers agility.
I assume the complete $2,500 report will become available from the companies listed in the report. For now, think agility. Think IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, along with the 10 other companies.
Remember, these are 13 juicy and agile outfits. Remarkable. Juicy.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2015
The HP Autonomy Enterprise Search Epic Continues
September 26, 2015
I don’t play baseball anymore. I did. I was okay, but one of the fellows who lived in my neighborhood in central Illinois played very well. He played everyday. After a stellar high school career, he became a fielder in the major leagues. The pressure was too much. He made bad decisions. He tried to claw back to the starting rotation. Instead of swinging with the relaxed, fluid motion I recalled from our days of playing together, he tried to hit a home run every time at bat. His confidence dwindled away, and he became a person who did not perform. Last I heard, he had fallen victim to his inner demons and was searching for a panacea. But, in my opinion, he struck out. Bad management.
Definition of panacea:
noun 1. a remedy for all disease or ills; cure-all. 2. an answer or solution for all problems or difficulties:
I thought about this person when I read “Deal Divided H-P Leaders” in the September 26, 2015, Wall Street Journal. You may need to pay to access this article which is available at as “Hewlett Packard’s Then Chairman Ray Lane Tried to Quash Autonomy Acquisition.”
The main point of the write up is that HP wanted a panacea, and the senior management of HP thought Autonomy, a search and content processing company, was the answer to HP’s revenue challenges.
The Wall Street Journal points out that the Chairman of the Board of Directors was supportive of the multi billion dollar deal and then wanted to kill the deal.
Also, the WSJ identifies what I would call a “management” problem; to wit:
HP missed other red flags in assessing the Autonomy deal. In 2013, the Journal reported that outside auditors for Autonomy had noted that an Autonomy executive had alleged improper accounting practices at the company [Autonomy]. However, HP executives briefed on the allegations hadn’t passed them along to HP’s Board or to Mr. Apotheker [president and Autonomy deal supporter].
The Wall Street Journal article includes a point I made in my 2003 analysis of Autonomy, a version of which appeared in the first edition of the Enterprise Search Report.
Revenues from software which allows employees to locate information germane to work activities has for decades faced a major hurdle; namely, making sales and keeping customers. The problem, which persists today, is that enterprise search vendors have a tough time making basic key word search command the type of license fees and corporate commitment which enterprise resource planning, accounting, and compliance-related systems demand.
Enterprise search vendors have, again for decades, explained that search and retrieval was something more than finding a needed document. The buzzwords used for decades invoke “knowledge management,” “business intelligence,” and “customer support.” Each of these is baloney, but enterprise search vendors trapped. Making search work in the fast changing content environments in which organization operate was a tough technical problem. The costs of engineering fixes was uncontrollable, and, not surprisingly, enterprise search vendors layered on additional functions in an effort to make sales, charge more, and stay in business.
Autonomy, along with IBM and OpenText, were firms which grew search via acquisition. Autonomy was perhaps the most successful of the roll up tacticians. The firm acquired Verity, a system which dated from the 1980s and added it to Autonomy’s earlier video management acquisitions, document management acquisitions, and other bits and pieces accumulated since Autonomy opened for business in the late 1990s.
Each acquisition added revenue to Autonomy’s financial reports and the customers of these acquisitions became candidates for other Autonomy products. At the time of the HP purchase decision, Autonomy had about six or seven times the revenue of Endeca, another late 1990s search vendor. (Oracle bought Endeca for $1.1 billion in 2011. Other search vendors sold in the 2008 t0 2014 period traded from much lower purchase prices; for example, IBM bought Vivisimo for $20 million, a figure which was equivalent to one year Vivisimo revenues.)
HP did not, in my opinion, understand that search and retrieval was a business that broke the backs of many bright MBAs and whiz kid engineers. HP assumed that its management team would triumph in generating billions from Autonomy’s core technology. I think some of Autonomy’s innovations are important, but I know that Autonomy was able to generate six or seven times the revenue of the number two search vendor in 2011 because it managed a portfolio of content processing companies and did a pretty good job of generating revenue from lines of business ADJACENT to search and retrieval.
HP wanted the 1990s technology of Autonomy to generate billions. HP quickly learned that its view of Autonomy did not match what Autonomy’s management team built.
I am not sure how bright folks at HP could not look at the failures of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Siderean, and other search vendors and not ask, “What’s different about search?”
HP wanted a panacea. HP demonstrates the type of problem my friend who became a major league player had and still has. In the big leagues, swinging for the fences, seeking a silver bullet, and looking for a quick fix is easy. Finding a fix for a company with problematic business models and conflicting management views is very difficult.
What does the HP experience suggest? After decades of enterprise search hyperbole, reality is different from the word picture sales professionals create in the minds of those whose desperation clouds their thinking.
My view is that HP has struck out. Bad management in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2016
Intel and Its Search Quest: Maana from Heaven
September 26, 2015
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to “Rethinking Enterprise Search for the Big Data Age.” The write up explains that old-school search won’t do the trick in today’s digital content environment.
I learned that the Manna Search and Discovery Platform is built on a modern Hadoop stack that leverages HDFS, the Accumulo graph database, Apache Spark, heaps of Scala code, and a host of various machine learning algorithms for teasing knowledge out of reams of unstructured data.
The write up veers into a swamp I try to avoid. I am not sure what knowledge is, and I have a heck of a time figuring out how data becomes information. The knowledge part is a mystery for brighter “sparks” to pursue.
The Maana system is a “search and discovery platform.” The write up quotes a Mr. Thompson who explains:
You can tell Maana, ‘I want to know all pieces of equipment that have led to most unplanned downtime,” Thompson says. After telling it to look in the Gulf and entering the appropriate EQP code, the system returns of histogram of pieces of equipment with the most amount of downtime. “So you get very quickly through a simple search and filtering operation a visual representation of the underlying data.”
The magic is that the system:
can join multiple disparate data sets and enable users to search and discover data across them in a semantic method. “It’s very simple to navigate the entire information space, which may be being fed from many different sources simultaneously,” Thompson says. “But you’re working at level of domain concepts.”
Okay, a modern Version of a federating system with clustering, correlation, classification, data mining, semantic, and correlation features.
The open source software issue is an interesting one. The write up points out that Maana relies on Apache Spark. However, I did a quick memory refresh on the Maana Web site which states here that the system is not based on Lucene/Solr.
The company is backed by Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Frost Data Capital, and GE Ventures. I also noticed that Intel has a stake in the company. Intel, in my opinion, continues to explore content processing. After the company’s adventure (maybe misadventure with Convera (formerly Excalibur Technologies), Intel took a stake in Endeca. Endeca sold itself to Oracle and Intel has obviously moved on to Maana.
Will the LucidWorks approach to Big Data capture customers who want to make sense of Big Data? Will Elasticsearch make inroads? My hunch is that Big Data will come under the influence of the systems built to deal with flows of real time data from disparate sources, including audio and video. Most of these firms use open source search and retrieval tools as a utility.
Maana appears to be positioning itself to be a key player in Big Data access. I will wait to see which horses make it to the finish line.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2015
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
