Analyst reports about enterprise search
Gartner and Forrester have high opinions of FAST. Not coincidentally, you can download both those firms’ recent search industry survey reports from almost any page of www.fastsearch.com. Of the two, Forrester’s is both better and more recent.
Summarizing brutally, the big firms’ consensus seems to be:
- FAST and Autonomy are the clear leaders.
- Endeca has great technology and is coming on strong.
- Everybody else is a niche player, at least for now.
- Convera is in deep yogurt.
Forrester is particularly harsh on Convera. Presumably this has much to do with the fact that Convera did not cooperate well with the survey process. I shall not speculate as to which way the causality runs there – but I should note that Convera was quite cooperative with my research last week.
| Categories: Autonomy, Convera, Enterprise search, FAST, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Web search and enterprise search are coming together
Web search and enterprise search are in many ways fundamentally different problems. The biggest problem in web search is screening out pages that deliberately pretend to be relevant to a search. The second biggest problem is picking out the crème de la crème from a long list of essentially good hits. In enterprise search, on the other hand, the biggest problem is finding a single document, or single fact, that is lonely at best, and if you’re unlucky doesn’t exist in the corpus at all. Document structures are also completely different, as are linking structures and almost every other input to the ranking algorithms except the raw words themselves.
Even so, the businesses and technologies of web and enterprise search are beginning to combine. Read more
| Categories: Convera, Enterprise search, FAST, Search engines | 3 Comments |
Convera aka Excalibur aka ConQuest
Once upon a time, more than a decade before the founding of Autonomy, a New Mexico inventor had the idea for a generic pattern recognition tool. He implemented it on a PC add-in board that, if I recall correctly, plugged into the Apple II. This was the genesis of the company Excalibur Technologies.
| Categories: Convera, Enterprise search, Ontologies, Search engines | 5 Comments |
UIMA data point
While talking with Attensity today about much else, I asked them about UIMA. What they said is not inconsistent with what I heard from IBM itself. According to Attensity:
- A year ago almost no customers cared about UIMA.
- Now UIMA is regularly showing up on government RFPs.
- Private sector interest in UIMA is still very limited.
| Categories: Open source text analytics, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
More on Attensity
I had a long and far-ranging talk today with Attensity. Key takeaways included:
- They want to be positioned in the BI space, e.g. as “ETL for text/unstructured data.” They place a lot of value on their partnership with Business Objects and Teradata. And, as a key part of the exhaustive extraction/FRN story, they think that BI/data warehouse information roll-up tools are an excellent (if imperfect) substitute for hardcore semantic extraction.
- Attensity 4 is coming out soon, and it’s going to feature extremely multimodal text analysis.
| Categories: Attensity, Text mining | 3 Comments |
Application processes in text mining – finding warning signs
Sergei Ananyan’s claim that analytic business processes involving text are still very primitive is absolutely correct. Indeed, analytic business processes have a lot of maturing to do overall. Still, there’s one area where the industry has devoted a lot of thought over the past few years, and some notion of process has emerged. This is in the finding of warning signs.
Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Text mining | 6 Comments |
Pioneers moving on
Ramana Rao is leaving Inxight, or has by now. Today I also discovered that Todd Wakefield is leaving Attensity. Such things happen in all industries, of course.
| Categories: Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
Megaputer on the text mining market
Sergei Ananyan is president of Megaputer, which is not one of the easier companies to get information about. They’re an essentially Russian firm based in Bloomington, Indiana. Their website is, to put it kindly, not up to date. And I wound up speaking with Sergei while he was at his rural vacation house, located somewhere between the Black and Aral Seas.
However, Sergei followed up by email with his views of the marketplace, and I think they’re interesting enough to share below. I really like his focus on analytic business processes, something that generally doesn’t get enough consideration.
| Categories: Megaputer, Text mining | 1 Comment |
The comment function is your friend!
We have discussion going in the comment threads to a couple of posts. Mary Crissey of SAS and Olivier Jouve of SPSS responded to this one on sales/marketing of text analytics, and customer response. (Mary: There are followup queries for you.) And Olivier and Glenn Fannick of Factiva offered appropriate responses to my half-serious comment about the French presence in text analytics.
I hope to generate a significantly more discussion here; your feedback can add a lot of value! (Even more if it’s to a post where I just wrote about your company. I don’t understand those of you who liked what I wrote so well that you linked to it from your websites, but then didn’t seize the opportunity to tack on a bit more of your marketing message in the comment thread.)
Finally, even if you have nothing else to add here, could I please have a few test comments added to this post? Olivier had trouble posting today, so I posted for him. It worked well for me. Of course, if you have trouble posting, please please email me about it. curtmonash at monash dot com is my main email address; given my spam volume, it would be highly prudent to make the title unmistakable, so that I pick your note out from the noise.
Thanks!!
CAM
| Categories: About this blog | 3 Comments |
Introduction to ClearForest
I had a fascinating talk with Jay Henderson of ClearForest Friday. While I have more research to do before I know what I really think, there already is plenty to post about.
ClearForest is one of the two companies whose name comes up for fact extraction applications, probably even a little ahead of Attensity. Their flagship account is the GM deal they did with IBM, kicking off the whole warranty report mining boom. Procter & Gamble is no slouch of a customer either. They’re involved enough in anti-terrorism that, when I asked Jay if he knew who Cogito was, he said “Of course.” And apparently one of their techie founders is the guy who coined the term “text mining” in the first place.
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Text mining | 1 Comment |