Webnodes has announced CMS to have dynamic support for Schema.org. The new feature has an intuitive vocabulary mapping user interface as well as a code API and Asp.Net controls to streamline the work for site developers. The Webnodes CMS ontology management user interface provides a separation between data, data model and presentation layout. Schema.org which is all about making search engines understand the meaning of your content is a natural extension to the semantic core engine. http://www.webnodes.com
Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 20 of 60)
Research, analysis, and news about enterprise search and search markets, technologies, practices, and strategies, such as semantic search, intranet collaboration and workplace, ecommerce and other applications.
Before we consolidated our blogs, industry veteran Lynda Moulton authored our popular enterprise search blog. This category includes all her posts and other enterprise search news and analysis. Lynda’s loyal readers can find all of Lynda’s posts collected here.
For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.
Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Endeca Technologies, Inc., a provider of unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions. A privately-held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Endeca provides products that help companies analyze unstructured data, gain better business intelligence, and deliver a better customer experience. Endeca’s core technology, the MDEX Engine, is designed to enable enterprises to correlate and analyze unstructured data. Endeca InFront is a leading customer experience management platform that enables businesses to deliver targeted and relevant customer experiences online with merchandising and content targeting tools for web commerce. Endeca Latitude is a technology platform that enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications bringing information from many unstructured and structured information sources together. The combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together. The combination of Oracle ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. The combination of Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca Latitude is expected to provide a comprehensive business intelligence foundation and analytic applications, bringing together information from structured and unstructured data sources. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. http://www.oracle.com/ http://www.endeca.com
Why isn’t “search” the logical end-point in any content and information management activity. If we don’t care about being able to find valued and valuable information, why bother with any of the myriad technologies employed to capture, organize, categorize, store, and analyze content. What on earth is the point of having our knowledge workers document the results of their business, science, engineering and marketing endeavors, if we never aspire to having it retrieved, leveraged or re-purposed by others?
However, in Information Week, an article in the September 5, 2011 issue entitled “HP Transformation: Autonomy is a Modest Start” gave me a jolt with this comment: Autonomy has very sophisticated search capabilities including federation–the ability to search across many repositories and sources–and video and image search. But with all that said, enterprise search isn’t a hot, mission-critical business priority. [NOTE: in the print version the “call-out” box had slightly different phrasing but it jumped off the page, anyway.] This is pretty provocative and disappointing to read in the pages of this particular publication.
Over the past few months, I have been engrossed in working on several client projects related to taxonomy development, vocabulary management and integration with content and search systems. There is no doubt that every one of these institutions is focused with laser intensity on getting the search interface to deliver the highest value for the effort and dollars expended. In each case, the project involved a content management component for capturing metadata with solid uniformity, strong vocabulary control, and rich synonym tables for ensuring findability when a search query has different language than the content or metadata. Every step in each of these projects has come back to the acid test, “will the searcher be able to find what s/he is looking for.”
In past posts I have commented on the strength of enterprise search technologies, and the breadth of offerings that cover a wide array of content findability needs and markets. From embedded search (within content management systems, archive and records management systems, museum systems, etc.), to standalone search engines designed to work well in discrete vertical markets or functional areas of enterprises (e.g., engineering, marketing, healthcare, energy exploration) buyers have a wealth of options from which to choose. Companies that have formerly focused on web site management, business intelligence, data mining, and numerous other content related tools are redefining themselves with additional terminology like e-discovery, 360-degree views (of information), content accessibility, and unified information.
Without the search component, all of the other technologies, which have been so hot in the past, are worthless. The article goes on to say that the hottest areas (of software growth) are business analytics and big-data analysis. Neither of these contributes business value without search underpinnings.
So, let’s get off this kick of under-rating and marginalizing search as “not mission critical” and think very seriously about the consequences of trying to run any enterprise without being able to find the products of our intellectual work output.
Today we highlight Workshop C: Justifying Enterprise Search: Mitigating Risk and Getting the Right Fit taking place at Gilbane Boston, November 29, 9:00am – 12:00pm at the Westin Waterfront.
While enterprise search has been debated, maligned, and challenged as a high value infrastructure application over the past decade, it has a place in every enterprise with valuable content. This presentation highlights how to make the right decisions about enterprise search applications. From embedded search to high-end semantic applications, the options are numerous and the technologies solid. However, the right choice is imperative and basing selection on business priorities requires artful analysis and justification. Illustrating the risks of continuing to operate with a faulty search solution is a good way to focus thinking about the search environment in any organization.
Instructor:
Lynda Moulton, Senior Analyst & Consultant, Outsell Gilbane Services
HP and Autonomy Corporation announced the terms of a recommended transaction under which HP will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Autonomy for £25.50 ($42.11) per share in cash. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both HP and Autonomy. The Autonomy board of directors also has unanimously recommended its shareholders accept the Offer. Based on the closing stock price of Autonomy on August 17, 2011, the consideration represents a one day premium to Autonomy shareholders of approximately 64 percent and a premium of approximately 58 percent to Autonomy’s prior one month average closing price. The transaction will be implemented by way of a takeover offer extended to all shareholders of Autonomy. A document containing the full details of the Offer will be dispatched as soon as practicable after the date of this release. The acquisition of Autonomy is expected to be completed by the end of calendar 2011. Founded in 1996, Autonomy is a provider of infrastructure software for the enterprise with a customer base of more than 25,000 global companies. Positions HP as leader in large and growing space‚Äî Autonomy has a strong position in the $20 billion enterprise information management space, which is growing at 8 percent annually and is uniquely positioned to continue growth within this space. Furthermore, key Autonomy assets would provide HP with the ability to reinvent the $55 billion business analytics software and services space, which is growing at 8 percent annually. Reasons for the acquisition were cited as‚Äî Complements HP’s existing technology portfolio; Provides differentiated IP for services and extensive vertical capabilities in key industries; Provides IPG a base for content management platforms; Enhances HP’s financial profile; as well as Autonomy should be accretive to HP’s earnings. http://www.hp.com/ http://www.autonomy.com/
Endeca Technologies, Inc., an agile information management software company, announced native integration of Endeca Latitude with Apache Hadoop. Endeca Latitude, based on the Endeca MDEX hybrid search-analytical database, is uniquely suited to unlock the power of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is strong at manipulating semi-structured data, which is a challenge for traditional relational databases. This combination provides flexibility and agility in combining diverse and changing data, and performance in analyzing that data. Enabling Agile BI requires a complete data-driven solution that unites integration, exploration and analysis from source data through end-user access that can adapt to changing data, changing data sources, and changing user needs. Solutions that require extensive pre-knowledge of data models and end-user needs fail to meet the agility requirement. The united Endeca Latitude and Apache Hadoop solution minimizes data modeling, cleansing, and conforming of data prior to unlocking the value of Big Data for end-users. http://www.endeca.com/ http://hadoop.apache.org/
Here we are, half way through 2011, and on track for a banner year in the adoption of enterprise search, text mining/text analytics, and their integration with collaborative content platforms. You might ask for evidence; what I can offer is anecdotal observations. Others track industry growth in terms of dollars spent but that makes me leery when, over the past half dozen years, there has been so much disappointment expressed with the failures of legacy software applications to deliver satisfactory results. My antenna tells me we are on the cusp of expectations beginning to match reality as enterprises are finding better ways to select, procure, implement, and deploy applications that meet business needs.
What follows are my happy observations, after attending the 2011 Enterprise Search Summit in New York and 2011 Text Analytics Summit in Boston. Other inputs for me continue to be a varied reading list of information industry publications, business news, vendor press releases and web presentations, and blogs, plus conversations with clients and software vendors. While this blog is normally focused on enterprise search, experiencing and following content management technologies, and system integration tools contribute valuable insights into all applications that contribute to search successes and frustrations.
Collaboration tools and platforms gained early traction in the 1990s as technology offerings to the knowledge management crowd. The idea was that teams and workgroups needed ways to share knowledge through contribution of work products (documents) to “places” for all to view. Document management systems inserted themselves into the landscape for managing the development of work products (creating, editing, collaborative editing, etc.). However, collaboration spaces and document editing and version control activities remained applications more apart than synchronized.
The collaboration space has been redefined largely because SharePoint now dominates current discussions about collaboration platforms and activities. While early collaboration platforms were carefully structured to provide a thoughtfully bounded environment for sharing content, their lack of provision for idiosyncratic and often necessary workflows probably limited market dominance.
SharePoint changed the conversation to one of build-it-to-do-anything-you-want-the way-you-want (BITDAYWTWYW). What IT clearly wants is single vendor architecture that delivers content creation, management, collaboration, and search. What end-users want is workflow efficiency and reliable search results. This introduces another level of collaborative imperative, since the BITDAYWTWYW model requires expertise that few enterprise IT support people carry and fewer end-users would trust to their IT departments. So, third-party developers or software offerings become the collaborative option. SharePoint is not the only collaboration software but, because of its dominance, a large second tier of partner vendors is turning SharePoint adopters on to its potential. Collaboration of this type in the marketplace is ramping wildly.
Convergence of technologies and companies is on the rise, as well. The non-Microsoft platform companies, OpenText, Oracle, and IBM are placing their strategies on tightly integrating their solid cache of acquired mature products. These acquisitions have plugged gaps in text mining, analytics, and vocabulary management areas. Google and Autonomy are also entering this territory although they are still short on the maturity model. The convergence of document management, electronic content management, text and data mining, analytics, e-discovery, a variety of semantic tools, and search technologies are shoring up the “big-platform” vendors to deal with “big-data.”
Sitting on the periphery is the open source movement. It is finding ways to alternatively collaborate with the dominant commercial players, disrupt select application niches (e. g. WCM ), and contribute solutions where neither the SharePoint model nor the big platform, tightly integrated models can win easy adoption. Lucene/Solr is finding acceptance in the government and non-profit sectors but also appeal to SMBs.
All of these factors were actively on display at the two meetings but the most encouraging outcomes that I observed were:
- Rise in attendance at both meetings
- More knowledgeable and experienced attendees
- Significant increase in end-user presentations
The latter brings me back to the adoption issue. Enterprises, which previously sent people to learn about technologies and products to earlier meetings, are now in the implementation and deployment stages. Thus, they are now able to contribute presentations with real experience and commentary about products. Presenters are commenting on adoption issues, usability, governance, successful practices and pitfalls or unresolved issues.
Adoption is what will drive product improvements in the marketplace because experienced adopters are speaking out on their activities. Public presentations of user experiences can and should establish expectations for better tools, better vendor relationship experiences, more collaboration among products and ultimately, reduced complexity in the implementation and deployment of products.
I continue to be impressed by the new ways in which enterprise search companies differentiate and package their software for specialized uses. This is a good thing because it underscores their understanding of different search audiences. Just as important is recognition that search happens in a context, for example:
- Personal interest (enlightenment or entertainment)
- Product selection (evaluations by independent analysts vs. direct purchasing information)
- Work enhancement (finding data or learning a new system, process or product)
- High-level professional activities (e-discovery to strategic planning)
Vendors understand that there is a limited market for a product or suite of products that will satisfy every budget, search context and the enterprise’s hierarchy of search requirements. Those who are the best focus on the technological strengths of their search tools to deliver products packaged for a niche in which they can excel.
However, for any market niche excellence begins with six basics:
- Customer relationship cultivation, including good listening
- Professional customer support and services
- Ease of system installation, implementation, tuning and administration
- Out-of-the box integration with complementary technologies that will improve search
- Simple pricing for licensing and support packages
- Ease of doing business, contracting and licensing, deliveries and upgrades
While any mature and worthy company will have continually improved on these attributes, there are contextual differentiators that you should seek in your vertical market:
- Vendor subject matter expertise
- Vendor industry expertise
- Vendor knowledge of how professional specialists perform their work functions
- Vendor understanding of retrieval and content types that contribute the highest value
At a recent client discussion the application of a highly specialized taxonomy was the topic. Their target content will be made available on a public facing web site and also to internal staff. We began by discussing the various categories of terminology already extracted from a pre-existing system.
As we differentiated how internal staff needed to access content for research purposes and how the public is expected to search, patterns emerged for how differently content needs to be packaged for each constituency. For you who have specialized collections to be used by highly diverse audiences, this is no surprise. Before proceeding with decisions about term curation and determining the granularity of their metadata vocabulary, what has become a high priority is how the search mechanisms will work for different audiences.
For this institution, internal users must have pinpoint precision in retrieval on multiple facets of content to get to exactly the right record. They will be coming to search with knowledge of the collection and more certainty about what they can expect to find. They will also want to find their target(s) quickly. On the other hand, the public facing audience needs to be guided in a way that leads them on a path of discovery, navigating through a map of terms that takes them from their “key term” query through related possibilities without demanding arcane Boolean operations or lengthy explanations for advanced searching.
There is a clear lesson here for seeking enterprise search solutions. Systems that favor one audience over another will always be problematic. Therefore, establishing who needs what and how each goes about searching needs to be answered, and then matched to the product that can provide for all target groups.
We are in the season for conferences; there are a few next month that will be featuring various search and content technologies. After many years of walking exhibit halls and formulating strategies for systematic research and avoiding a swamp of technology overload, I try now to have specific questions formulated that will discover the “must have” functions and features for any particular client requirement. If you do the same, describing a search user scenario to each candidate vendor, you can then proceed to ask: Is this a search problem your product will handle? What other technologies (e.g. CMS, vocabulary management) need to be in place to ensure quality search results? Can you demonstrate something similar? What would you estimate the implementation schedule to look like? What integration services are recommended?
These are starting points for a discussion and will enable you to begin to know whether this vendor meets the fundamental criteria laid out earlier in this post. It will also give you a sense of whether the vendor views all searchers and their searches as generic equivalents or knows that different functions and features are needed for special groups.
Look for vendors for enterprise search and search related technologies to interview at the following upcoming meetings:
Enterprise Search Summit, New York, May 10 – 11 […where you will learn strategies and build the skill sets you need to make your organization’s content not only searchable but “findable” and actionable so that it delivers value to the bottom line.] This is the largest seasonal conference dedicated to enterprise search. The sessions are preceded by separate workshops with in-depth tutorials related to search. During the conference, focus on case studies of enterprises similar to yours for better understanding of issues, which you may need to address.
Text Analytics Summit, Boston, May 18 – 19 I spoke with Seth Grimes, who kicks off the meeting with a keynote, asking whether he sees a change in emphasis this year from straight text mining and text analytics. You’ll have to attend to get his full speech but Seth shared that he see a newfound recognition that “Big Data” is coming to grips with text source information as an asset that has special requirements (and value). He also noted that unstructured document complexities can benefit from text analytics to create semantic understanding that improves search, and that text analytics products are rising to challenge for providing dynamic semantic analysis, particularly around massive amounts of social textual content.
Lucene Revolution, San Francisco, May 23 – 24 […hear from … the foremost experts on open source search technology to a broad cross-section of users that have implemented Lucene, Solr, or LucidWorks Enterprise to improve search application performance, scalability, flexibility, and relevance, while lowering their costs.] I attended this new meeting last year when it was in Boston. For any enterprise considering or leaning toward implementing open source search, particularly Lucene or Solr, this meeting will set you on a path for understanding what that journey entails.
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
