Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Day: September 9, 2020

Bloomreach announces Commerce Experience Accelerator for SAP Commerce Cloud

Bloomreach announced the availability of a new ‘Commerce Experience Accelerator’ for SAP Commerce Cloud that allows businesses to quickly connect to the Bloomreach Experience Platform (brX) to create personalized digital buying experiences for their customers. This new accelerator consists of three major components:

  1. a Commerce Connector, which is a GraphQL-based front-end integration that enables SAP Commerce Cloud to run headless,
  2. a Product Feed Connector, to utilize the product feed from SAP Commerce and import into the brX Search and Merchandising modules, and
  3. React-based SPA Reference Storefronts for B2B and B2C to enable companies to go-live fast. Bloomreach, through its React, Vue and Angular SDKs, supports SAP Spartacus and other SPAs seamlessly while providing choice and flexibility for enterprise customers.

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2020/bloomreach-announces-new-commerce-experience-accelerator-for-sap-commerce-cloud.html

Hyland enters definitive agreement to acquire Alfresco

Hyland, a content services provider, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alfresco, a content services platform and solutions provider for information-rich enterprises with huge volumes of unstructured content. The transaction, expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, is subject to usual and customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Headquartered in Boston, Alfresco develops a modern, cloud-native Digital Business Platform that delivers content services solutions to connect, manage and protect organizations’ most critical information. Upon transaction close, the entire Alfresco business is expected to be managed under Hyland Software, Inc.

https://news.hyland.com/hyland-enters-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-alfresco/, https://www.alfresco.com

Agility CMS announces rebuilt Content Modeling software

Agility CMS has rebuilt its Content Modeling feature, improving the ability for users to create and update content and content relationships quickly and easily. Agility CMS takes a structure-first approach to designing content, creating an organized model that makes content easy to understand and process. Content modeling features:

  • A hub for content – Customize content models right in the CMS using Agility’s visual builder.
  • An optimized editor experience – Group fields together, set required fields, default values and much more.
  • A future-proof platform – Define structured content that is decoupled from the presentation layer.
  • An evolving content model – Switching from editing content to your definition allows for quick updates and promotes iterating on your content models.

https://agilitycms.com

Qlik announces enhancements to Insight Advisor

Qlik announced enhancements to Insight Advisor, its AI assistant built into Qlik Sense, to deliver augmented intelligence capabilities for cloud analytics. Drawing on Qlik’s Associative Engine, combined with natural language processing (NLP) and cognitive technology. Users can interact with Insight Advisor in a variety of different ways, including search-based visual analysis (NLP-driven), conversational analytics (chat), associative insights to expose hidden data relationships, assistance with creation and data preparation, and advanced analytics calculation and integration. Updated features include:

  • Insight Advisor Chat – A new, fully conversational analytics experience native to Qlik Sense SaaS, available in the Qlik Sense hub in multiple languages. Uses NLP and natural language generation to understand user intent and generate both narrative and visual responses.
  • Business Logic – Ability to create business rules and metadata to customize and guide Insight Advisor’s behavior when generating insights and understanding natural language.
  • Advanced Analytics Calculation – A new function, K-Means Clustering, allows data points to be grouped together based on similarity and is highly useful for customer segmentation, fraud detection and many other use cases. In addition, Insight Advisor will now auto-generate cluster and correlation charts in search-based visual analysis.
  • Search-based Visual Analysis on Mobile – In addition to Chat, search-based insight generation is now available on handheld devices.

https://www.qlik.com/us/company/press-room/press-releases/qlik-expands-insight-advisor-to-deliver-robust-ai-driven-experience

DataStax announces availability of Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI)for Apache Cassandra

DataStax announced the general availability of Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI) for Apache Cassandra available on Astra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE). DataStax has also opened a Cassandra Enhancement Proposal (CEP) with the Apache Cassandra project to share this with the open source community. With Storage-Attached Indexing, developers now have accessibility to familiar indexing and queries – such as WHERE clauses – in Apache Cassandra. Storage-Attached Indexing is an index implementation that enables users to index multiple columns on the same table without scaling issues. The benefits of Storage-Attached Indexing include:

  • Improved stability
  • Significantly reduces disk usage
  • Improved numeric range performance
  • Releases constraints to data modeling and barriers to scale-out
  • Features modern and expected indexing features on Apache Cassandra

https://www.datastax.com/press-release/datastax-lowers-barriers-nosql-adoption-storage-attached-indexing-apache-cassandra

Gilbane Advisor 9-9-20 — schema.org, AI ops, IT arch, NLP

Who benefits from schema. org?

Schema.org, linked data, and knowledge graphs are powerful tools for organizing and navigating vast amounts of information. Much of the current energy around these tools is related to SEO and search engines, especially Google, who depend on them to provide a better search experience. These same tools help commercial and corporate publishers deliver better, and more unique, web experiences to researchers and other content consumers.

We all have a stake in how well these tools work, so we need to understand the process of creating and managing them, and how stakeholders share the cost, risk, and benefit of the raw material, technical development, and maintenance.

schema.org logo

Content strategist Michael Andrews’ deep dive into the history and process behind schema.org’s management is an enlightening read for stakeholders.

Taming the tail: adventures in improving AI economics

Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein focus on the business models and challenges of machine learning companies and products, which are more unique than you might realize and something we need to learn a lot more about. We recommended an earlier article of theirs on the differences between the business models of AI companies and software companies. This article is a follow-up and provides some guidance on how to deal with some of the challenges previously identified. Especially interesting is their example of long-tailed distributions to illustrate the importance problem understanding. 

Headless meets serverless – a tierless architecture for frictionless enterprise

The components of modern enterprise IT architectures have changed considerably in the last few years.  The use of APIs, microservices, XaaS (everything as a service), headless, and serverless approaches have, individually and especially in conjunction, become strategically critical. As Phil Wainewright puts it…

As these connected digital technologies mesh together, they begin to reshape the nature of the enterprise, opening up new ways to collaborate, connect and do business. We are still at the very beginning of adjusting to what this means for how we live and work.

Wainewright explains what these technologies are, describes related activity and trends, and makes a case for a tierless model. His article is relevant and will be helpful to both IT and business managers.

The field of natural language processing is chasing the wrong goal

Researchers are too focused on whether AI systems can ace tests of dubious value. They should be testing whether systems grasp how the world works.

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We do not sell or share personal data.

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