Author Archive

01: Charting the HP – Autonomy Deal

If you have been following the coverage of HP’s proposed acquisition of Autonomy, then you’ve likely picked up on a handful of repeated phrases, including “big data” “data science” and “information management.” Some terms are new, some are old, but each describes what enterprises are increasingly wrestling to control and leverage – namely, unstructured information. As HP looks to its software future while shedding its hardware past, it’s clear it views Autonomy as the first piece in addressing the big data problem.

From our perspective, we see the acquisition as validation of ISYS’s strategy of helping enterprises and technology partners manage and exploit their unstructured content assets. Further supporting this is the significant growth we have seen in our ISYS Document Filters technology, which is helping technology partners like MarkLogic, Sybase and Attensity account for unstructured information in their content applications. Below you will find a handful of perspectives on this deal, from analysts to subject matter experts. Leslie Owens of Forrester offers a thorough analysis and a view on some of the challenges ahead.

• What is Autonomy Without its Marketing? (Leslie Owens, Forrester)
• HP Rumored to be Buying UK’s Autonomy for 10b (Dave Kellogg, Kellblog)
• Autonomy Marketing, Meet HP (Miles Kehoe, Enterprise Search Blog)

02: Welcome Michael Neiswender

ISYS is delighted to welcome Michael Neiswender to our expanding technology partner Sales team.  Michael will be instrumental in building on the commercial success we have already achieved with our proprietary Document Filters technology.  Previously with Autonomy and a true industry veteran, Michael brings a wealth of experience and relationships to the business as we embark on an exciting period in our history.  We will continue to focus on delivering high-performance enterprise search solutions based on true innovation and world-class IP – free from any wider distractions.  Our customers and prospects would expect nothing less.

03: Make a Difference With ISYS

At last – an opportunity to give back! 

I don’t know about you, but I have often found myself in a rather awkward position throughout my career. 

As someone with school aged children, I have found myself approached on numerous occasions in my capacity as an employee of various IT organisations, with the simple request – “Is your organisation able to help us out with IT equipment or expertise?” 

More often than not, I have found myself having to deliver answers that are negative or excuses such as “sorry, our company does not donate equipment, we recycle everything” leaving me somewhat frustrated that this is something that I haven’t been able to impact.  That is, until now.

ISYS has launched a new initiative “Make a Difference” which at last enables IT employees and organisations to “give back” to their local schools.  

By migrating from Oracle (Outside In) or Autonomy (KeyView) with our Migration Program, ISYS not only ensures an organisation achieves a better product and service at a lower price, we will “Make a Difference” of $2,500 for IT to a local school of that organisation’s choice. *

At last I can attend my children’s local school and give a positive response when approached to assist them with their IT needs.  It’s great to be able to make a difference!

* ISYS will make an equivalent donation in other currencies for companies based outside the US

04: If you only do what you have always done …

I have thought a lot lately about the current state of innovation in the IT industry. Sure there are some standouts, and always will be, but on average are we becoming more, well, average? Does the current acquisition spree help or hinder innovation? What will be the impact of the global financial crisis, and is the insular nature of the IT industry doing us any favours?

As someone who came through that magnificent innovation engine that was Bell Labs, it almost seems we have come full circle. There always needs to be an innovation/commercialisation trade off. Unless innovation generates commercial benefit, it is difficult to argue for a sustaining of investment, and some would argue that there were a lot of “R&D institutions” in previous decades that did not focus enough on revenue generation, or even how to fund the innovation. But have we gone too far? With the current industry heavyweights on an acquisition spree like the world has never seen, it seems like we are now at the other end — focusing on revenue at the expense of innovation. When two-year-old businesses can even be offered the staggering sum of USD6B (let alone turn it down); when businesses are being created with the express intent of being sold to Google, have we gone too far? Yes it is easy to acquire innovation, but that does not guarantee it can be sustained. 

The real impact of the GFC on innovation is also yet to be felt. In times of financial crisis, costs across the business are given that extra scrutiny. While what I call the ‘event horizon’ of R&D – that period of time between the product idea and the product reality –  has certainly contracted, it is rarely in the same financial year as the expenditure. Consequently a lot of R&D funding in the last 18 months was reduced. This has a direct impact on innovation, and we will see a number of companies having a gap in their product release schedules in the next two to four years. 

The reason I have been thinking about this is close home. At ISYS we have recently found a niche with our ISYS Document Filters. This technology performs text extraction and viewing, similar to technology that Autonomy and Oracle acquired. The difference is we really care about it, and it is a large part of our business. So for us, innovating in this area becomes a competitive differentiator, and we think our customers deserve it. Our challenge has become how do we tell the world what we have? How do we reach a user and business community that has been anaesthetised by receiving the same types of messages from the same types of companies? I spoke recently with a strategy director at a large advertising firm, and during the conversation I realised that the problem is possibly of our own making. When most of us hire people we insist on them having done the job before, in a company just like ours. How does that generate new ideas and diversity of thought? Remember the diversity push in large companies in the mid 1990s? I think it is time to have another. Be brave, go hire the next marketing person, or next sales person from a completely different industry. Go diverse – you just might be surprised with the result.

05: Forget “Search” — It Is All About The “Virtual Aggregation” Of Data

I mentioned in a post late last year that 2010 would be the year of federated search, but now I think we need to go even further …

The number of record and content management systems that are coming onto the market (and the investment that is being made by vendors and customers alike) is simply staggering.  In isolation, a large number of these systems are good applications; some are even great … with some tremendous functionality.  But having spent time at the HP TRIM User Forum (TUF23) in Sydney last week, I can say they all have one thing in common – they require end users to know where content is in order to find it.

Think about this for a minute … if you know your content is in HP TRIM, then the search in TRIM will allow you to find what you are looking for, same if you know your content is in SharePoint.  However, no matter what role you have in an organisation, chances are you will interact with more than one of these data repositories.  From an enterprise perspective we cannot continue to expect our users to know where information lives.

The issue today is that data needs to live in different places.  These different repositories are purpose-built for the type of information that they contain.  The term “federated search” does not really do the concept justice … more accurately, what we are doing with federated search is providing users with the ability to find information by “virtually aggregating data” or allowing users to ask for some information that is likely scattered across multiple repositories.  

We can even take this one step further, following on from the commentary about “physical” data aggregation projects that are being embarked upon in Europe and the US after some high-profile information failures.  If you have a physical data aggregation project going on in your organisation, stop right now and see if there is a better way to accomplish the end result you are looking for. 

We can wrestle with terminology all we want (CMSWatch’s Theresa Regli recently presented some great thoughts on the related topic of “enterprise search” vs “federated search”), as long as we all agree that the true benefit of this technology is to locate and leverage information where it resides.

06: Open Source Search – Ready For Prime Time?

Well… it really depends on who you are and where you are. In the US, vendors like Lucid Imagination are making a business out of the support of Lucene/Solr. There are even commercial search vendors developing products off a Lucene base. Open source search outside the US is not as prevalent. We see it to some degree in Europe, but not in Asia Pacific. When IT budgets are tight, doing some prototype development with open source to prove the merits of a business case certainly has value. Just make sure you are clear on the end goal of that prototype. Turning a prototype into a final commercial product only works if the technology was selected correctly in the first place. A lot of prototyping technology is designed specifically to generate a prototype, and do it quickly. Moving to a final product requires something different again.

But back to the original question…it really comes down to a question of your company’s appetite for risk. At a recent conference, the CIO of a large financial institution was talking about her attitude to open source in general. In her words – when something goes wrong you can’t hold the open source developer community accountable; sometimes you just need a commercial entity in there with you that you can put some pressure on, the “one throat to choke” so to speak.

Now you may be in a company that does embrace open source and is willing to tolerate the General Public License (GPL) aspects. If this is the case and you have enough expertise in house to deal with anything that goes wrong, then perhaps it is for you. If you do go down the Open Source Search route, be sure to come talk to us about the ISYS File Readers. The availability of document filters is clearly a key area of open source search that’s not ready for prime time.

07: Security for federated search

Thank you to all those who commented on the recent post, and as a number of you pointed out, yes, security is a challenge in an environment with multiple data repositories. Stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper that will tell you everything you need to know about security in a federated search environment. We’ll do our best to have it out by the end of January!

08: 2010 – the year of Federated Enterprise Search?

How the landscape has changed…ten years ago we had many different file types, but not many places to store them. Today, we have fewer file types, but many more repositories – add the complexity of the different security models into the mix and clearly the focus of enterprise search is changing. It is good to see the issue of federated search finally being raised, witness recent articles in the likes of Information Week.

The question that enterprises need to ask is who is best placed to provide true federated search? My opinion is that it is not the owner of any one of the repositories —  it is those companies that have an independent view of data. We will be hearing more about this issue in 2010 as our customers demand better access to information, and don’t care what email system of document repository their data resides in.