Author: Lynda Moulton (Page 5 of 18)

Semantically Focused and Building on a Successful Customer Base

September 1, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Dr. Phil Hastings and Dr. David Milward spoke with me in June, 2010, as I was completing the Gilbane report, Semantic Software Technologies: A Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise. My interest in a conversation was stimulated by several months of discussions with customers of numerous semantic software companies. Having heard perspectives from early adopters of Linguamatics’ I2E and other semantic software applications, I wanted to get some comments from two key officers of Linguamatics about what I heard from the field. Dr. Milward is a founder and CTO, and Dr. Hastings is the Director of Business Development.

A company with sustained profitability for nearly ten years in the enterprise semantic market space has credibility. Reactions from a maturing company to what users have to say are interesting and carry weight in any industry. My lines of inquiry and the commentary from the Linguamatics officers centered around their own view of the market and adoption experiences.

When asked about growth potential for the company outside of pharmaceuticals where Linguamatics already has high adoption and very enthusiastic users, Drs. Milward and Hastings asserted their ongoing principal focus in life sciences. They see a lot more potential in this market space, largely because of the vast amounts of unstructured content being generated, coupled with the very high-value problems that can be solved by text mining and semantically analyzing the data from those documents. Expanding their business further in the life sciences means that they will continue engaging in research projects with the academic community. It also means that Linguamatics semantic technology will be helping organizations solve problems related to healthcare and homeland security.

The wisdom of a measured and consistent approach comes through strongly when speaking with Linguamatics executives. They are highly focused and cite the pitfalls of trying to “do everything at once,” which would be the case if they were to pursue all markets overburdened with tons of unstructured content. While pharmaceutical terminology, a critical component of I2E, is complex and extensive, there are many aids to support it. The language of life sciences is in a constant state of being enriched through refinements to published thesauri and ontologies. However, in other industries with less technical language, Linguamatics can still provide important support to analyze content in the detection of signals and patterns of importance to intelligence and planning.

Much of the remainder of the interview centered on what I refer to as the “team competencies” of individuals who identify the need for any semantic software application; those are the people who select, implement and maintain it. When asked if this presents a challenge for Linguamatics or the market in general, Milward and Hastings acknowledged a learning curve and the need for a larger pool of experts for adoption. This is a professional growth opportunity for informatics and library science people. These professionals are often the first group to identify Linguamatics as a potential solutions provider for semantically challenging problems, leading business stakeholders to the company. They are also good advocates for selling the concept to management and explaining the strong benefits of semantic technology when it is applied to elicit value from otherwise under-leveraged content.

One Linguamatics core operating principal came through clearly when talking about the personnel issues of using I2E, which is the necessity of working closely with their customers. This means making sure that expectations about system requirements are correct, examples of deployments and “what the footprint might look like” are given, and best practices for implementations are shared. They want to be sure that their customers have a sense of being in a community of adopters and are not alone in the use of this pioneering technology. Building and sustaining close customer relationships is very important to Linguamatics, and that means an emphasis on services co-equally with selling licenses.

Linguamatics has come a long way since 2001. Besides a steady effort to improve and enhance their technology through regular product releases of I2E, there have been a lot of “show me” and “prove it” moments to which they have responded. Now, as confidence in and understanding of the technology ramps up, they are getting more complex and sophisticated questions from their customers and prospects. This is the exciting part as they are able to sell I2E’s ability to “synthesize new information from millions of sources in ways that humans cannot.” This is done by using the technology to keep track of and processing the voluminous connections among information resources that exceed human mental limits.

At this stage of growth, with early successes and excellent customer adoption, it was encouraging to hear the enthusiasm of two executives for the evolution of the industry and their opportunities in it.

The Gilbane report and a deep dive on Linguamatics are available through this Press Release on their Web site.

Semantic Technology: Sharing a Large Market Space

August 26, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

It is always interesting to talk shop with the experts in a new technology arena. My interview with Luca Scagliarini, VP of Strategy and Business Development for Expert System, and Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System USA was no exception. They had been digesting my research on Semantic Software Technologies and last week we had a discussion about what is in the Gilbane report.

When asked if they were surprised by anything in my coverage of the market, the simple answer was “not really, nothing we did not already know.” The longer answer related to the presentation of our research illustrating the scope and depth of the marketplace. These two veterans of the semantic industry admitted that the number of players, applications and breadth of semantic software categories is impressive when viewed in one report. Mr. Scagliarini commented on the huge amount of potential still to be explored by vendors and users.

Our conversation then focused on where we think the industry is headed and they emphasized that this is still an early stage and evolving area. Both acknowledged the need for simplification of products to ease their adoption. It must be straightforward for buyers to understand what they are licensing, the value they can expect for the price they pay; implementation, packaging and complementary services need to be easily understood.

Along the lines of simplicity, they emphasized the specialized nature of most of the successful semantic software applications, noting that these are not coming from the largest software companies. State-of-the-art tools are being commercialized and deployed for highly refined applications out of companies with a small footprint of experienced experts.

Expert System knows about the need for expertise in such areas as ontologies, search, and computational linguistic applications. For years they have been cultivating a team of people for their development and support operations. It has not always been easy to find these competencies, especially right out of academia. Aker and Scagliarini pointed out the need for a lot of pragmatism, coupled with subject expertise, to apply semantic tools for optimal business outcomes. It was hard in the early years for them to find people who could leverage their academic research experiences for a corporate mission.

Human resource barriers have eased in recent years as younger people who have grown up with a variety of computing technologies seem to grasp and understand the potential for semantic software tools more quickly.

Expert System itself is gaining traction in large enterprises that have segmented groups within IT that are dedicated to “learning” applications, and formalized ways of experimenting with, testing and evaluating new technologies. When they become experts in tool use, they are much better at proving value and making the right decisions about how and when to apply the software.

Having made good strides in energy, life sciences, manufacturing and homeland security vertical markets, Expert System is expanding its presence with the Cogito product line in other government agencies and publishing. The executives reminded me that they have semantic nets built out in Italian, Arabic and German, as well as English. This is unique among the community of semantic search companies and will position them for some interesting opportunities where other companies cannot perform.

I enjoyed listening and exchanging commentary about the semantic software technology field. However, Expert System and Gilbane both know that the semantic space is complex and they are sharing a varied landscape with a lot of companies competing for a strong position in a young industry. They have a significant share already.

For more about Expert System and the release of this sponsored research you can view their recent Press Release.

Data Mining for Energy Independence

August 17, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Mining content for facts and information relationships is a focal point of many semantic technologies. Among the text analytics tools are those for mining content in order to process it for further analysis and understanding, and indexing for semantic search. This will move enterprise search to a new level of research possibilities.

Research for a forthcoming Gilbane report on semantic software technologies turned up numerous applications used in the life sciences and publishing. Neither semantic technologies nor text mining are mentioned in this recent article Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s in the New York Times but I am pretty certain that these technologies had some role in enabling scientists to discover new data relationships and synthesize new ideas about Alzheimer’s biomarkers. The sheer volume of data from all the referenced data sources demands computational methods to distill and analyze.

One vertical industry poised for potential growth of semantic technologies is the energy field. It is a special interest of mine because it is a topical area in which I worked as a subject indexer and searcher early in my career. Beginning with the 1st energy crisis, oil embargo of the mid-1970s, I worked in research organizations that involved both fossil fuel exploration and production, and alternative energy development.

A hallmark of technical exploratory and discovery work is the time gaps between breakthroughs; there are often significant plateaus between major developments. This happens if research reaches a point that an enabling technology is not available or commercially viable to move to the next milestone of development. I observed that the starting point in the quest for innovative energy technologies often began with decades-old research that stopped before commercialization.

Building on what we have already discovered, invented or learned is one key to success for many “new” breakthroughs. Looking at old research from a new perspective to lower costs or improve efficiency for such things as photovoltaic materials or electrochemical cells (batteries) is what excellent companies do.
How does this relate to semantic software technologies and data mining? We need to begin with content that was generated by research in the last century; much of this is just now being made electronic. Even so, most of the conversion from paper, or micro formats like fîche, is to image formats. In order to make the full transition to enable data mining, content must be further enhanced through optical character recognition (OCR). This will put it into a form that can be semantically parsed, analyzed and explored for facts and new relationships among data elements.

Processing of old materials is neither easy nor inexpensive. There are government agencies, consortia, associations, and partnerships of various types of institutions that often serve as a springboard for making legacy knowledge assets electronically available. A great first step would be having DOE and some energy industry leaders collaborating on this activity.

A future of potential man-made disasters, even when knowledge exists to prevent them, is not a foregone conclusion. Intellectually, we know that energy independence is prudent, economically and socially mandatory for all types of stability. We have decades of information and knowledge assets in energy related fields (e.g. chemistry, materials science, geology, and engineering) that semantic technologies can leverage to move us toward a future of energy independence. Finding nuggets of old information in unexpected relationships to content from previously disconnected sources is a role for semantic search that can stimulate new ideas and technical research.

A beginning is a serious program of content conversion capped off with use of semantic search tools to aid the process of discovery and development. It is high time to put our knowledge to work with state-of-the-art semantic software tools and by committing human and collaborative resources to the effort. Coupling our knowledge assets of the past with the ingenuity of the present we can achieve energy advances using semantic technologies already embraced by the life sciences.

Leveraging Language in Enterprise Search Deployments

July 23, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

It is not news that enterprise search has been relegated to the long list of failed technologies by some. We are at the point where many analysts and business writers have called for a moratorium on the use of the term. Having worked in a number of markets and functional areas (knowledge management/KM, special libraries, and integrated library software systems) that suffered the death knell, even while continuing to exist, I take these pronouncements as a game of sorts.

Yes, we have seen the demise of vinyl phonograph records, cassette tapes and probably soon musical CD albums, but those are explicit devices and formats. When you can’t buy or play them any longer, except in a museum or collector’s garage, they are pretty dead in the marketplace. This is not true of search in the enterprise, behind the firewall, or wherever it needs to function for business purposes. People have always needed to find “stuff” to do their work. KM methods and processes, special libraries and integrated library systems still exist, even as they were re-labeled for PR and marketing purposes.

What is happening to search in the enterprise is that it is finding its purpose, or more precisely its hundreds of purposes. It is not a monolithic software product, a one-size-fits-all. It comes in dozens of packages, models, and price ranges. It may be embedded in other software or standalone. It may be procured for a point solution to support retrieval of content for one business unit operating in a very narrow topical range, or it may be selected to give access to a broad range of documents that exist in numerous enterprise domains on many subjects.

Large enterprises typically have numerous search solutions in operation, implementation, and testing, all at the same time. They are discovering how to deploy and leverage search systems and they are refining their use cases based on what they learn incrementally through their many implementations. Teams of search experts are typically involved in selecting, deploying and maintaining these applications based on their subject expertise and growing understanding of what various search engines can do and how they operate.

After years of hearing about “the semantic Web,” the long sought after “holy grail” of Web search, there is a serious ramping of technology solutions. Most of these applications can also make search more semantically relevant behind the firewall. These technologies have been evolving for decades beginning with so-called artificial intelligence, and now supported by some categories of computational linguistics such as specific algorithms for parsing content and disambiguating terms. A soon to-be released study featuring some of noteworthy applications reveals just how much is being done in enterprises for specific business purposes.

With this “teaser” on what is about to be published, I leave you with one important thought, meaningful search technologies depend on rich linguistically-based technologies. Without a cornucopia of software tools to build terminology maps and dictionaries, analyze content linguistically in context to elicit meaning, parse and evaluate unstructured text data sources, and manage vocabularies of ever more complex topical domains, semantic search could not exist.

Language complexities are challenging and even vexing. Enterprises will be finding solutions to leverage what they know only when they put human resources into play to work with the lingo of their most valuable domains.

Weighing In On The Search Industry With The Enterprise In Mind

June 10, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

Two excellent postings by executives in the search industry give depth to the importance of Dassault Système’s acquisition of Exalead. If this were simply a ho-hum failure in a very crowded marketplace, Dave Kellogg of Mark Logic Corporation and Jean Ferré of Sinequa would not care.

Instead they are picking up important signals. Industry segments as important as search evolve and its appropriate applications in enterprises are still being discovered and proven. Search may change, as could the label, but whatever it is called it is still something that will be done in enterprises.

This analyst has praise for the industry players who continue to persevere, working to get the packaging, usability, usefulness and business purposes positioned effectively. Jean Ferré is absolutely correct; the nature of the deal underscores the importance of the industry and the vision of the acquirers.

As we segue from a number of conferences featuring search (Search Engines, Enterprise Search Summit, Gilbane) to broader enterprise technologies (Enterprise 2.0) and semantic technologies (SemTech), it is important for enterprises to examine the interplay among product offerings. Getting the mix of software tools just right is probably more important than any one industry-labeled class of software, or any one product. Everybody’s software has to play nice in the sandbox to get us to the next level of adoption and productivity.

Here is one analyst cheering the champions of search and looking for continued growth in the industry…but not so big it fails.

Search Engines – Architecture Meets Adoption

May 6, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

Trying to summarize a technology space as varied as that covered in two days at the Search Engines Meeting in Boston, April 26-27, is a challenge and opportunity. Avoiding the challenge of trying to represent the full spectrum, I’ll stick with the opportunity. Telling you that search is everywhere, in every technology we use and has a multitude of cousins and affiliated companion technologies is important.

The Gilbane Group focuses on content technologies. In its early history this included Web content management, document management, and CMS systems for publishers and enterprises. We now track related technologies expanding to areas including standards like DITA and XML, adoption of social tools, plus rapid growth in the drive to localize and globalize content; Gilbane has kept up with these trends.

My area, search and more specifically “enterprise search” or search “behind the firewall,” was added just over three years ago. It seemed logical to give attention to the principal reason for creating, managing and manipulating content, namely finding it. When I pay attention to search engines, I am also thinking about adjoining content technologies. My recent interest is helping readers learn about how technology on both the search side and content management/manipulation side need better context; that means relating the two.

If one theme ran consistently through all the talks at Enterprise Search Meeting, it was the need to define search in relationship to so many other content technologies. The speakers, for the most part, did a fine job of making these connections.

Here are just some snippets:

Bipin Patel CIO of ProQuest, shared the technology challenges of maintaining a 24/7 service while driving improvements to the search usability interface. The goal is to deliver command line search precision to users who do not have the expertise to (or patience) to construct elaborate queries. Balancing the tension between expert searchers (usually librarians) with everyone else who seeks content underscores the importance of human factors. My take-away: underlying algorithms and architecture are worth little if usability is neglected.

Martin Baumgartel spoke on the Theseus project for the semantic search marketplace, a European collaborative initiative. An interesting point for me is their use of SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) from Eclipse. By following some links on the Eclipse site I found this interesting presentation from the International Theseus Convention in 2009. The application of this framework model underscores the interdependency of many semantically related technologies to improve search.

Tamas Doszkocs of the National Library of Medicine told a well-annotated story of the decades of search and content enhancement technologies that are evolving to contribute to semantically richer search experiences. His metaphors in the evolutionary process were fun and spot-on at a very practical level: Libraries as knowledge bases > Librarians as search engines > the Web as the knowledge base > Search engines as librarians > moving toward understanding, content, context, and people to bring us semantic search. A similar presentation is posted on the Web.

David Evans noted that there is currently no rigorous evaluation methodology yet for mobile search but is it very different than what we do with desktop search. One slide that I found most interesting was the Human Language Technologies (HLT) that contribute to a richer mobile search experience, essentially numerous semantic tools. Again, this underscores that the challenges of integrating sophisticated hardware, networking and search engine architectures for mobile search are just a piece of the solution. Adoption will depend on tools that enhance content findability and usability.

Jeff Fried of Microsoft/Fast talked about “social search” and put forth this important theme: that people like to connect to content through other people. He made me recognize how social tools are teaching us that the richness of this experience is a self-reinforcing mechanism toward “the best way to search.” It has lessons for enterprises as they struggle to adopt social tools in mindful ways in tandem with improving search experiences.

Shekhar Pradhan of Docunexus shared this relevant thought about a failure of interface architecture and that is (to paraphrase): the ubiquitous search box fails because it does not demand context or mechanisms for resolving ambiguity. Obviously, this breaks down adoption for enterprise search when it is the only option offered.

Many more talks from this meeting will get rolled up in future reports and blogs.

I want to learn your experiences and observations about semantic search and semantic technologies, as well. Please note that we have posted a brief survey for a short time at: Semantic Technology Survey. If you have any involvement with semantic technologies, please take it.

Prove It! – The POC & Other Types of Evaluation for Enterprise Search

April 21, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

When a product is described as “the only”, “the best”, the “most complete”, “the fastest,” “the leading,” etc., does anyone actually read and believe these qualifiers in marketing copy, software or otherwise? Do we believe it when an analyst firm writes reviews, or when product hype appears in industry publications?

Most technology buyers have a level of cynicism about such claims and commentary because we know that in each case there is a bias, with good reasons, for the praise. However, also for good reasons, language containing positive sentiment can have an effect – otherwise, it would not be so widespread. At the very least, sentiment analysis tools that are integrated with search engines will pick up on pervasive tones of praise, and from that create new content streams that compound the positive spin.

Being aware of marketing methods and influences on our psyche should arm us with caution but not to a point of being risk averse or frozen to indecisiveness. Instead, we need to find a way to prove the hype and claims through thoughtful, artful and strategic analytical processes. We need methods for testing claims that are appropriate for the solution sought.

First, we need to establish what is appropriate for our business need. Cost is often the primary qualifying factor when narrowing products that will be considered, but this may be short sighted. Business impact and benefits from applying the right solution need to be directly in our line of sight. If the solution you acquire can be evaluated to demonstrate a significant business benefit, the cost of a higher priced product may also be high-value to your business. Add to business impact the scope for the use of an enterprise search engine (how widely deployed and leveraged) and whether it can scale to include multiple searchable repositories across the organization; these attributes may enhance business impact.

Judging business impact, scope and scaling enterprise search products is a tricky proposition. You absolutely cannot do it by totaling the number of positive checks a vendor ticks off on a spreadsheet of requirements. While such a device can be useful for narrowing down a field of products to those you might select, it is only a beginning. All too often, this is where the selection process ends.

What needs to be done next? I recommend these evaluation steps that can be done concurrently:

Find customers by using social tools; reading and researching. With so many Web-based social and search tools it should be easy to identify individuals and enterprises that are actually users of products you are considering. Reach out, schedule talk time and have a pointed list of questions ready to investigate their experiences – listen carefully and follow up on any comments that sound a note of caution.
Run a proof-of-concept initiative that includes serious testing by key users with content that is relevant to the testers. Develop test cases and define explicitly for the testers what they are searching, and what you want to learn.
Keep careful notes throughout your interactions with vendors, as you seek information, test their products and request answers to technical questions. The same goes for the conversations with their customers, the ones you find on your own, not just the ones vendors steer you to. Your inquiry needs to include information about business relationship issues, responsiveness, ease of use, and how well a vendor can understand and respond to your business needs in these early relationship stages.
If things are not going smoothly, observe how a vendor reacts and responds; what is their follow-up and follow-through in the pre-purchase stage? Never succumb to the excuse that because they are “going through growing pains,” have “so much business demand” they are stretched thin, or that something else is more important to them than your product evaluation. If any of these creep in before you purchase, you have a major symptom conveying clearly that your business is not as important to the vendor or not as valuable as another company’s.

Longevity of use of an enterprise search application must be foremost in your mind throughout all of these steps. While many enterprises try to plan for upgrading or replacing legacy software applications to remain competitive and current using newer technologies, actual experiences are rarely ideal. You could be “stuck” with your choice for a decade or longer. Being in a dependent relationship with a vendor or product you are not happy with, will be a miserable experience and no benefit to your enterprise, no matter how popular the product is in the industry press.

The steps for selection will take a little longer than just sending out RFPs and reading responses, but it is really worth it over the long haul relationship you are about to engage.

Forecasting Software Product Abandonment

March 2, 2010 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Given the announcement from Microsoft that it would make 2010 releases of Fast on Linux and UNIX the last for these operating systems, a lot of related comments have appeared over the past few weeks. For those of us who listened intently to early commentary on the Fast acquisition by Microsoft about its high level of commitment to dual development tracks, it only confirms what many analysts suspected would happen. Buyers rarely embrace their technology acquisitions solely (or even primarily) for the technology.

While these 2010 releases of Fast ESP on UNIX and Linux will continue to be supported for ten years, and repositories are projected to be indexable on these two platforms by future Fast releases, some customers will opt out of continuing with Fast. As newer and more advanced search technologies support preferred operating systems, they will choose to move. Microsoft probably expects to retain most current customers for the time being – inertia and long evaluation and selection processes by enterprises are on their side.

This recent announcement did include a small aside questioning whether Microsoft would continue to offer a standalone search engine outside of its SharePoint environment where the Fast product has been embedded and leveraged first. It sounds like the short term plan is to continue with standalone ESP, but certainly no long term commitment is made.

So, whatever stasis/constancy pre-Microsoft Fast customers were feeling sanguine about, it is surely being shaken around. Let’s take a look at some reasons that vendors abandon their acquisitions. First we need to consider why companies add products through acquisition in the first place. A simple list looks like this:

Flat sales
Need to penetrate a growth market or industry
Desire to demonstrate strength to its existing customer base by acquiring a high-end brand name
Need for technology, IP, and expertise
Desire to expand the customer base, quickly

While item 1 probably was not a contributor to the Microsoft Fast acquisition, 2 and 3 certainly factored into their plan. Fast was “the” brand and had become synonymous in the marketplace with “enterprise search leader.” Surely Microsoft considered the technology IP and key employees that they would be acquiring, and having a ready-made customer-base and maintenance revenue stream would be considerations, too.
Customers do have reasons to be nervous in any of these big acquisitions, however. Here is what often get exposed and revealed once the onion is peeled:

Game changing technology is playing havoc in the marketplace; in search there are numerous smaller players with terrific technologies, more nimble and innovative development teams with rigorous code control mentalities, and the experience of having looked at gaps in older search technologies.
Cost of supporting multiple code bases is enormous, so the effort of developing native support on multiple platforms becomes onerous.
For any technology, loss of technical gurus (particularly when there has been a culture of loose IP control, poor capture of know-how, and limited documentation) will quickly drive a serious reality check as the acquirer strives to understand what it has bought.
Brand name customers may not stick around to find out what is going to happen, particularly if the product was on the path to being replaced anyway. Legacy software may be in place because it is irreplaceable or simply due to the neglect of enterprises using it. It may be very hard for the acquiring buyer to determine which situation is the case. A change of product ownership may be just the excuse that some customers need to seek something better. Customers understand the small probability of having a quick and smooth integration of a just-acquired product into the product mix of a large, mature organization.
A highly diverse customer base, in many vertical markets, with numerous license configuration requirements for hardware and operating system infrastructures will be a nightmare to support for a company that has always standardized on one platform. Providing customer support for a variety of installation, tuning and on-going administration differences is just not sustainable without a lot of advance planning and staffing.

The Microsoft/Fast circumstance is just an illustration. You might take a look at what is also going on with SAP after its acquisition of Business Objects (BO) in this lengthy analysis at Information Week. In this unfortunate upheaval, BO’s prior acquisition of Inxight has been a particular loss to those who had embraced that fine analytics and visualization engine.

The bottom line is that customers who depend on technology of any kind, for keeping their own businesses running effectively and efficiently, must be aware of what is transpiring with their most valued vendor/suppliers. When there is any changing of the guardians of best-of-breed software tools, be prepared by becoming knowledgeable about what is really under the skin of the newly harvested onion. Then, make your own plans accordingly.