(A little) more on Business Objects/Inxight
After missing what seems to have been an uninformative press conference anyway, I hooked up later with the Business Objects folks on the phone. I say that it was probably uninformative because in the short call, it was pointed out to me that they really weren’t at liberty to say much anyway. Here are a couple of tidbits I picked up even so.
- Business Objects’ text mining partnerships have been more demo/sales-cycle than actual sales up until now. That said, they have a few deals each with Attensity and Inxight (but not with ClearForest, which pulled in its horns prior to being acquired by Reuters). I still think they’re the leading BI vendor in integrating with text mining, SAS perhaps aside (who if nothing else have a lot of fun using text mining for data cleaning). The working Inxight partnership, by the way, was all about the specific app of email compliance, with the demo being based on the publicly available Enron corpus.
- Inxight’s visualization technology is in the form of an SDK anyway. So integrating it into BOBJ’s product line should be straightforward. Note: Through the Excelsius acquisition, BOBJ has been trying to gain competitive advantage in the cool-visualization area.
- Inxight’s “federation” capability for search is pretty primitive (my term and opinion of course, not theirs). It takes in search result sets from various sources, then clusters and/or refilters them. What it does NOT do is the much harder task of taking actual relevancy rankings from various engines and somehow arbitrating between them. Nor, I’m guessing, does it even assign higher or lower weights to various corpuses or anything like that. Thus, it does not sound terribly competitive with the distributed search capabilities built into any state-of-the-art enterprise search engine.
| Categories: Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, ClearForest/Reuters, Enterprise search, SAS, Search engines, Text mining | 5 Comments |
Business Objects is acquiring Inxight!
The press conference is a little ways off, but the news has come across the wire that Business Objects is acquiring text analytics/text mining vendor Inxight.
Quick context on Business Objects: BOBJ is a pioneer — perhaps THE pioneer — of modern business intelligence. Recently it has gone on an acquisition-heavy bulking-up strategy. There is no assumption that ALL its pieces will fit into one seamless whole. For large enterprises, it is increasing its professional services emphasis (as a complement to new license sales, not a replacement for them).
Quick context on Inxight: Inxight spun off from Xerox PARC with all sorts of cool text-related technologies. But while it’s somewhat of a competitor in generic text mining, visualization, and so on, the one market where it has really succeeded is in OEM software for filtering and tokenization, serving search and text mining vendors alike. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Companies and products, Text mining | 1 Comment |
Huge e-commerce gains claimed by everybody
The folks at Progress claim huge conversion rate benefits to EasyAsk, although unfortunately so far I’ve been unable to drill down and see what those numbers really mean. (Flagship customer = Land’s End.) Baynote makes more modest but still large claims. (Flagship customer = no big names that I’m aware of.) Endeca is clearly the market leader. (Flagship customers = Wal-Mart, Home Depot.) Mercado and Inquira are important players, at least in certain verticals.
I think it’s safe to say that e-commerce site navigation aids constitute a really important product category.
| Categories: Baynote, Endeca, InQuira, Mercado, Progress and EasyAsk, Search engines, Structured search | 1 Comment |
Wise Crowds of Long-Tailed Ants, or something like that
Baynote sells a recommendation engine whose motto appears to be “popularity implies accuracy.” While that leads to some interesting technological ideas (below), Baynote carries that principle to an unfortunate extreme in its marketing, which is jam-packed with inaccurate buzzspeak. While most of that is focused on a few trendy meme-oriented books, the low point of my briefing today was the probably the insistence against pushback that “95%” of Google’s results depend on “PageRank.” (I think what Baynote really meant is “all off-page factors combined,” but anyhow I sure didn’t get the sense that accuracy was an important metric for them in setting their briefing strategy. And by the way, one reason I repeat the company’s name rather than referring to Baynote by a pronoun is that on-page factors DO matter in search engine rankings.)
That said, here’s the essence of Baynote’s story, as best I could figure it out. Read more
| Categories: Baynote, Google, Ontologies, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Social software and online media, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specialized search | 4 Comments |
ClearForest, Reuters, Factiva, Dow Jones, and possible futures
ClearForest is being acquired by Reuters. That ClearForest is being bought is unsurprising. The company recently pulled in its marketing horns dramatically, a common sign of putting oneself up for sale. The Reuters move, meanwhile, can be seen as a sequel to the divestiture of its half of Factiva to former 50-50 partner Dow Jones.
If the two main parts of the text mining market are custom publishing and finding warning signs, then both could actually be a good fit with Reuters. The custom publishing part is obvious. As for early warning – well, maybe ClearForest will lose its competitive edge in consumer product warranty analysis or something, but a significant fraction of the early warning market is tied to news articles, web postings, and other things that are a good fit for Reuters.
But the really interesting (at least to me) possibilities arise in the core Reuters and Dow Jones business of supporting investment decisions. Read more
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Factiva/Dow Jones, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
For search, extreme network neutrality must not be compromised
In a recent post on the Monash Report, I drew a distinction between two aspects of the Internet:Jeffersonet and Edisonet.Jeffersonet deals in thoughts and ideas and research and scholarship and news and politics, and in commerce too.It’s what makes people so passionate about the Internet’s democracy-enhancing nature.It’s what needs to be protected by extreme network neutrality.And it’s modest enough in its bandwidth requirements that net neutrality is completely workable.(Edisonet, by way of contrast, comprises advanced applications in entertainment, teleconferencing, etc. that probably do require new capital investment and tiered pricing schemes.)
And if there’s one application that’s at the core of Jeffersonet, it’s search.No matter how much scary posturing telecom CEOs do – and no matter how profitable or monopolistic Google becomes – telecom carriers must never be allowed to show any preference among search engines!At least, that’s the case for text-centric search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft run today.The reason is simple:The democratic part of the Internet only works so long as things can be found.And search will long be a huge part of how to find them.So search engine vendors must never be able to succeed based on a combination of good-enough results plus superior marketing and business development.They always have to be kept afraid of competition from engines that provide better actual search engine results. Read more
TEMIS, part 2 – application areas
CEO Eric Bregand clearly described TEMIS as being in three markets – life sciences, publishing, and “industrial.” However, based on his descriptions, I’d characterize industrial as itself having three components – competitive intelligence, adverse impact detection, and customer satisfaction. Legal is somewhere in the mix too.
The common theme among these markets seems to be an emphasis on applications where complex semantic analysis is important. Actually, I think it would be expedient for TEMIS to use the marketing hook of saying the subjects it does analysis about are complex. Nobody likes to be told their software is complex, but they don’t mind being told they’re experts in a complex discipline themselves. Read more
| Categories: TEMIS, Text mining | 2 Comments |
TEMIS, part 1 – overview
Due to various transatlantic communication glitches, I’d never had a serious briefing with text mining vendor TEMIS until yesterday, when I finally connected with CEO Eric Bregand. So here’s a quick TEMIS overview; I’ll discuss what they actually do in a separate post.
- TEMIS has 50 people; 3 main businesses and a couple of secondary ones; two larger offices in France; and smaller offices in Germany and the US. As would be expected, TEMIS’ customer base is concentrated in Continental Europe. The US exceptions seem concentrated in the life sciences vertical (not coincidentally, the US office is outside Philadelphia).
- Like Inxight, TEMIS is at least partly a spin-off from Xerox’s text analytics efforts. Indeed, its Grenoble office was acquired from Xerox. Unlike Inxight, TEMIS doesn’t serious pursue OEM business, but a couple of exceptions have occurred (Eric mentioned Convera and Documentum). Read more
| Categories: Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA, TEMIS, Text mining | 2 Comments |
Orlowski is back to his old tricks
Andrew Orlowski thinks he’s figured out the Apple/Google/Oracle partnership. But he has it all wrong.
| Categories: Enterprise search, Google, Humor, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Clarabridge takes on Attensity
Text mining newbie Clarabridge gave me the all-too-customary “Please let us brief you, but then don’t write about it for a while” routine. Now that it’s OK to post, what I’m up for offering is a few salient points in bullet form.
- The closest analogy to what Clarabridge does is Attensity’s new(ish) strategy – extract “facts” from documents and dump them into a relational database management system. In particular, Clarabridge and Attensity alike make the case “Our categorization is more flexible because it’s applied only after the extraction happens.”
- Clarabridge’s sweet spot is extracting user opinions from short documents. E.g., the customer uses cases they talk about are customer feedback forms, public blog postings, etc. about A. hotels and B. consumer software products.
- Clarabridge has a strong business intelligence mentality, describing the product as “ETL for unstructured data.” But then, it’s spun out of a BI consultancy that itself was founded by Microstrategy veterans.
- Clarabridge uses a different database schema than Attensity. Attensity’s fact-relationship network (FRN) is basically just two thin, long tables. Clarabridge, however, uses a Microstrategy-like star schema, in which different kinds of things that you can tokenize correspond to different dimensions.
Frankly, if somebody wants an alternative to the Attensity/Teradata/Business Objects partnership they could do worse than talk with Clarabridge.