The Gilbane Advisor

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Search Engines Under the Hood

This week’s thoughts come from the pile of serendipitous reading that routinely piles up on my desk. In this case a short article in Information Week caught my eye because it featured the husband of a former neighbor, Ken Krugler, co-founder of Krugle. I’d set it aside because a fellow, David Eddy, in my knowledge management forum group keeps telling us that we need tools to facilitate searching for old but still useful source code. In order to do it, he believes, we need an investment in semantic search tools that normalize the voluminous language variants scattered throughout source code. That would enable programmers to find code that could be re-purposed in new applications.

Now, I have taken the position that source code is just one set of intellectual property (IP) asset that is wasted, abandoned and warehoused for technology archaeologists of centuries hence. I just don’t see a solid business case being made to develop search tools that will become a semantic search engine for proprietary treasure troves of code.

Enters old acquaintance Ken Krugler with what seems to be, at first glance, a Web search system that might be helpful for finding useful code out on the Web, including open source. I have finally visited his Web site and I see language and new offerings that intrigue me. “Krugle Enterprise is a valuable tool for anyone involved in software development. Krugle makes software development assets easily accessible and increases the value of a company’s code base. By providing a normalized view into these assets, wherever they may be stored, Krugle delivers value to stakeholders throughout the enterprise.” They could be onto something big. This is a kind of enterprise search I haven’t really had time to think about but may-be I will now.
One thing leading to another, I checked out Ken Krugler’s blog and saw an earlier posting: Is Writing Your Own Search Engine Hard? This is recommended reading for anyone who even dabbles in enterprise search technology but doesn’t want to get her/his hands dirty with the mechanics. It is short, to-the-point and summarizes how and why so many variations of search are battling it out in the marketplace.

I don’t want end-users to struggle too much with the under the hood details but when you are thinking about enterprise search for your organization, it is worth considering how much technology you are getting for the value you want it to deliver, year after year, as your mountains of IP content accrue. Don’t give this idea short shrift because search is an investment that keeps giving if it is chosen appropriately for the problem you need to solve.

FatWire Acquires Future Tense Solutions

FatWire Software announced that it has acquired Future Tense Solutions, its Australian-based reseller. Prior to the close of the acquisition, Future Tense had exclusive rights to sell and distribute FatWire products throughout Australia and New Zealand. With this acquisition, FatWire gains a presence and direct access to customers in the region. Nigel Trinca, managing director of Future Tense, assumes the role of vice president of FatWire Australia and Future Tense co-founder, Bill Prescott, also joins the company. Future Tense Solutions was founded by a team of former Open Market colleagues who worked with FatWire’s product, Content Server. http://fatwire.com

SDL Buys Idiom: Not an “I”, now an “A”

Integration versus Acquisition, that is. Certainly the latter does not preclude the former. And we expect that it will most certainly not.

SDL and Idiom are making a strategic industry announcement with this move, with both obvious and subtle impacts on both the translation and content management industries. Most obvious is the influence it can have on the impact of integrating workflows, a year-long discussion we’ve having with the Gilbane community. Bringing more visibility to the Global Content Lifecycle and hopefully, more conversation on adding value throughout is a positive event. Ramifications on the state of content management interoperability, LSP neutrality, and market uptake for Idiom’s deep investment in the SaaS approach will be more subtle impacts, which will be important for our community to understand.

We’ll keep you posted as always, but note today’s facts:

  • This is not SDL’s first foray into merging the translation and content management technologies, demonstrated by May’s Tridion acquisition and the more recent investment in Trisoft, strengthening an already “deep” partnership albeit with no public announcement. Tridion caught the attention of marketing content management professionals; Trisoft should have caught the attention of techcomm content management professionals. Idiom will capture the attention of both.
  • As we discussed in Gilbane Boston 2007, organizations that understand the impact of multilingual communications on efficiency, brand, and revenue are moving globalization strategies upstream to “bake in” quality at source content creation. One of my favorite quotes during our Quality at the Source session was from Richard Sikes from the Localization Institute, who reminded our audience that “the whip cracks loudest at the farthest end.”
  • The acquisition announcement will trigger more conversation on topics included in our 2008 Globalization Wish List, in particular the idea of “closing the gap.”

See our post on the main Gilbane analyst blog. And stay tuned.

SDL acquires Idiom

SDL continues to execute its growth and expansion strategies with today’s announcement that it has acquired Idiom for approximately $22 million US. The current plan is to operate the Idiom business as an autonomous unit under the direction of Idiom CEO Mike Iacobucci.

The acquisition raises all kinds of questions, of course. Idiom is one of the companies with big potential to bring innovation to the language services industry, which has been ripe for change for some time now. More resources to execute could mean more value for customers sooner. Will the Idiom technology (and SaaS offer) reach its full potential as an agent of change under SDL? What about the impact on buyer choice — how will the acquisition affect companies coming into the market? Stay tuned for analysis of these and other key questions coming out of today’s news.

Read our perspective on Gilbane’s Globalization blog.

Traction for eBooks?

Steve Paxhia noted during a meeting the other day that the kindle is indeed still on back order, though as far as we know there are no definitive numbers out on how many they have actually sold. Still, unless there are extraordinarily problems with their manufacturing or supply chain, they have to be producing and selling a healthy number of them. In another meeting last week, someone actually said, “I will read that on my Kindle on the flight back.”
Then today, via Slashdot I learn that science fiction publisher Tor is giving away free eBooks in association with the launch of their new website. Science fiction is another market, along with romance, that has been good for eBooks, and this kind of wide-scale marketing strikes me as a logical next step.
UPDATE: Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press is making maximum use of his Kindle and thinks it beats the SkyMall catalog any day.

Here and There

  • Over at eWeek, Jim Rapoza looks at the most overhyped technologies of the century, and XML isn’t one of them.
  • At IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold speculates on the future of XML. He’s bullish on XQuery and Atom, and he declares the end of markup-centric editors.
  • Speaking of being bullish on Atom, check out Mochilla’s Atom-based API for premium content.
  • Geoff Bock sends along news that Microsoft’s push to get OOXML as a standard is being scrutinized by the EU.
  • Also on the OOXML front, IBM and Microsoft seem ready to go toe to toe. More perspective here and here.
  • Have you ever thought you should be able to take DITA-encoded content and pump it through InDesign? You are not alone.
  • If you follow the Apache Software Foundation or other technical listservs at any level of interest, you just have to try Mark Logic’s MarkMail application where you can ask questions like, “Who from Microsoft chimes in on the XML schema list at the W3C?“.
  • I’m not the only one to think that part of Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo is driven by Yahoo’s impressive efforts in wireless technology, which have XML at their core.
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