Blue Washing of IBMs Recent Acquisitions Might Affect Licensing Deals
August 23, 2012
Lately, IBM seems to be on an analytics-buying spree having successfully completed three acquisitions spaced only a month apart. Its latest purchase is Tealeaf Technology, which is a company that focuses on customer behavior analysis and digital customer experience management. Prior that, it was Varicent, which specializes on sales performance and compensation. And before that was Vivisimo, a discovery and data-capture software provider.
But pre-acquisition customers may have a problem with this later on. “IBM’s “Blue Washing” Affects Customers Worldwide – Scott & Scott, LLP Alerts Customers of Potential Licensing Surprises” discusses why:
“…IBM’s recent acquisition of Tealeaf, Vivisimo, and Varicent will likely change existing license agreements with the newly acquired publishers.
There are a number of legal strategies that can be employed when IBM ‘blue washes’ its code and its license agreements. Blue washing is IBM’s term used when IBM releases updated code and changes its licensing metrics for products acquired from other publishers. Once customers upgrade to IBM’s product, it is often too late to negotiate and avoid hefty licensing charges associated with changed licensing metrics…”
Blue washing isn’t an ideal situation for companies who have been using business-critical software under terms that are advantageous to them. But what can they do against IBM? What negotiating power do small companies have versus the blue giant?
Changes in licensing deals by IBM wouldn’t surprise us here at Beyond Search. The only thing left for the affected companies to do is to absorb one of two costs: IBM’s more costly licensing metrics or shifting to other software.
Lauren Llamanzares, August 23, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Does Microsoft Fare in the CRM Race?
April 28, 2012
Social, Mobile, and Cloud. These three are the main components of CRM. All of these allow users to connect anytime, anywhere, and any way they want. And Microsoft aims to incorporate all of these elements into their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Anywhere, which is due to be launched in 2Q of this year.
In the mobile aspect, they support all major tablet and smartphone OS including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. On the social side, Microsoft has Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn integration. They even have an Activity Feed that facilitates internal communications (ergo better service delivery and happier customers). In the cloud realm, Microsoft aims to do whatOracle and SAP have already implemented – a hybrid cloud strategy.
But are the efforts of Microsoft to compete in the CRM arena enough? The blog post entitled “Microsoft – Convergence at Last?” at Free Social CRM .COM answers this sufficiently:
“What’s become increasingly clear is that Microsoft due to pressure from the bottom (customer side) up and due to pressure… generated internally is beginning to seriously open up their thinking and step up their efforts to compete in the market… Some of their thinking and actions are incredibly smart, some just table stakes, but they also remain deficient in a few critical areas that they need to make them competitive at the enterprise level particularly.”
While the new features of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM line will help them compete better with the industry veterans, they still have a lot to worry about. They have their traditional competitors like Oracle’s Fusion and Siebel CRM, SAP CRM, Salesforce.com, and Sage as well as startups that have the potential to compete like SugarCRM.
Microsoft’s activity in the CRM field has been on and off for several years that their commitment seems questionable. We have yet to see how they will manage in the functionality-and-feature war this time. Will Fast Search morph into a customer support solution, a path followed by search vendors Coveo and Vivisimo.
Lauren Llamanzares, April 28, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
IBM Pushing Watson Through Video Marketing: A Good Thing?
April 23, 2012
Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, triggered media furor when it defeated two of the world’s best Jeopardy players in the much-publicized “Man vs. Machine” challenge early last year. Now, the same supercomputer system is being pitched by the company as a valuable healthcare resource that would help diagnose medical conditions and recommend treatments.
Wall Street Technology Association’s abstract of the webcast “Rebroadcast IBM Watson and Medical Records Text Analytics” reports the following:
With IBM Content Analytics and its healthcare-specific solution called Medical Records Text Analytics, the Natural Language Processing technologies used in Watson are available to unleash the content traditionally locked in doctor’s notes, clinical records, journal articles, desk references, drug uses / interactions, and many other medical content sources.
This move by IBM to embrace videos to promote its products and services is effective, but will only work on video-oriented IT procurement managers who don’t have the time and patience to read through pages upon pages of product manuals. The problem with videos is that they are not the real thing. Similar to the three-part Jeopardy episode that shows a machine trumping the best human players, video marketing relies heavily on post-production. Expertly done post-production will easily allow you to forge and optimize the ambiance, background, music, and other elements.
While we know that Watson is from the technology mogul IBM and uses proven search technologies like Lucene, SPARQL, and Indri, it needs more than a winning streak in a popular game show and videos with testimonials merely from healthcare industry professionals to prove its worth in providing solutions for businesses belonging to different industries.
Tell me, IBM. How else can you convince us to purchase your costly POWER7 servers and adapt Watson if there are other proven and inexpensive natural language processing solutions out in the market?
Lauren Llamanzares, April 23, 2011
Sponsored by Polyspot
SharePoint and Open Source: A Collision Ahead?
April 22, 2012
The latest release of SharePoint contains the features needed in order to function as a document, record, and content management system all rolled into one. In addition, it easily integrates into the MS Office Suite, particularly Office 2010 and 2007.
However, SharePoint 2010 lacks many features that a lot of users are looking for such as high-volume processing and document capture. In addition, because web technologies have evolved and come so far, users wish to see the same level of UI intuition, interactivity, and richness that modern websites possess. In order to reach that level, SharePoint has to be enhanced. Enter third-party solutions. And because many enterprises are using SharePoint (as of 2011 78% of Fortune 500 firms utilize it) want more from it on top of its in-the-box features yet don’t have enough resources to do so, SharePoint enhancement solutions have become a booming business.
A good example is Best Bets. In the white paper by SurfRay entitled “How to improve SharePoint Search with Best Bets in SharePoint 2010”, it is discussed how the said enhancement can improve the search experience of users:
Users who search in an enterprise context usually expect relevant document to populate the top of results every time, which can result in a poor user experience and abandonment of search when those expectations are not met. Best Bets, in effect, bypass the normal search engine algorithm’s assignment of relevance and value to a particular piece of content in order to make it rank highest for the selected keywords.
But SharePoint has many competitors, both licensed options and open-source ones. And open-source systems such as Alfresco, Drupal, and MindTouch have experienced an increase in user and developer base. Why? Probably mainly for the zero licensing cost. Then for their flexibility and wider browser compatibility.
But rumor has it that Microsoft will be releasing SharePoint 15 within this year. Will SharePoint remain a leader or will it suffer the same type of pressure brought by open source search solutions. You can track news about open source search in out new publication OpenSearchNews. There may be some fender benders but the intersection of open source and proprietary software is getting more heavily used.
Lauren Llamanzares, April 22, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Cutting Edge Privacy: Facebook and Google
May 17, 2010
What’s going on? The Europeans take umbrage at Google’s alleged collection of personal data whilst Wi-Fi sniffing. Read about the latest Math Club folly in “Google Data Admission Angers Europe.” Now flip to “Can You Quit Facebook?” These two outfits seem to be doing pretty much what they want and then scurrying in different directions to make their behavior somewhat PR-friendly.
In my opinion, the fact that both companies are acting in their own interests is standard operating procedure. The more interesting question is, “Which company is likely to emerge as the victor?”
I found “Ignore The Screams–Facebook’s Aggressive Approach Is Why It Will Soon Become The Most Popular Site In The World” edging toward Facebook’s side of the field. Here’s the passage I found thought provoking:
From a business perspective, in other words, Facebook’s approach to innovation is smart. It’s not always popular, but it works. And if Facebook wants to maintain its competitive edge, it will do what it has to do to smooth over the latest blow-up, and then go forth with the same approach and attitude it has had all along. Step back and think about what Facebook is doing here. It is pioneering an entirely new kind of service, one that most of its users have never seen before, one with no established practices or rules. It is innovating in an area–the fine line between public and private–that has always freaked people out. It is allowing people to communicate and share information in ways they never have before. It is making decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people. And it is trying to stay a step ahead of competitors that would like nothing better than to see it get scared and conservative and thus leave itself open to getting knocked off.
Google’s methods are, if the above analysis is accurate, old school. Facebook is new school. What happens when one old fashioned Soviet leader is replaced with an adjutant to a former Soviet leader? Old methods in a slightly updated package? I do not have an answer, but I think the Facebook frivolity requires close, close observation. It is new in a number of ways.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2010
Freebie
Open Source: Magic or Dirty Carpet?
February 25, 2010
I have to give the Guardian a pat on the back. I try to ignore open source, and my feedreaders keeps routing me open source articles. I ignore most of them. The Google-spider food headline, “When Using Open Source Makes You an Enemy of the State”, arrested me (no pun intended). The main idea is that copyright and intellectual property has another mini-storm front brewing. The key passage pivots on a person named Andres Guadamuz, a law professor in Scotland. The Guardian reported:
Guadamuz has done some digging and discovered that an influential lobby group is asking the US government to basically consider open source as the equivalent of piracy – or even worse.
You can read the original article to get the scoop. In a nutshell, legal eagles in the US (home of the sticky tort with spaghetti noodles) wants to make life tough for open source. The addled goose has not figured out the “secret” ACTA treaty and now he is nervous about open source.
I am using Windows to write this post, and I think I will watch this issue. My thought is that life must have been simpler in the 4th century.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Since I reference the era cheerfully tagged “Dark Ages,” I will report non payment for my work to the National Archives. Whoops. The US only goes back a couple of centuries. Well, shucks.
Intelligenx Profiled in CIO
October 2, 2009
A happy quack to the Intelligenx team. The write up in the Spanish language CIO was a PR coup for this Washington, DC area company. You can read the story “La Base de Datos no es el Futuro de los Datos” in Spanish here or in English via Google Translate. Intelligenx delivers blistering performance. The profile said:
Un muy importante Banco Latinoamericano, no llamó por que tenía una amenaza latente de seguridad, el tiempo de indexación de sus logs de todo un día era de 11 horas, utilizaban un servidor de 4 procesadores y 4 Gb de ram. Nosotros tomamos los datos los colocamos en una notebook con 2Gb de ram e indexamos todo en 20 minutos. Se podrán imaginar que no es posible brindar seguridad a un sistema con una demora de 11 horas para saber que ocurre en mis logs. Otro caso similar ocurrió con una empresa de telecomunicaciones que necesitaba guardar los registros de llamadas durante 30 días y estos registros sumaban 30 billones de registros, Cuando tenían un requerimiento judicial para buscar un dato específico en su base, le llevaba mas de 24 horas encontrar un dato y recibían mas de 30 requerimientos judiciales al mes…Otro caso interesante en el que confluyen la capacidad de Search con las capacidades de interoperabilidad de nuestro producto se dio en el Ministerio de Justicia de Brasil, con cinco regiones y cientos de juzgados que tenían plataformas y sistemas diferentes y consultar jurisprudencia era una tarea imposible. Con nuestro producto generamos una capa de interoperabilidad que se adapta a todas y cada una de las plataformas de cada juzgado y disponibilizamos cualquier documento en tiempos que no superan los 150 milisegundos.
A flap of the wings to the Zubair and Iqbal Talib.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2009
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