In one of those Autonomy announcements that seemingly appear out of nowhere, the company has declared its intention to “transform” the relational database market by applying its text analysis technology to content stored within database. The tool is called IDOL Structured Probabilistic Engine (SPE), as it uses the same Bayesian-based probabilistic inferencing technology that IDOL uses on unstructured information.
The quote from CEO Mike Lynch grandly proclaims this to be Autonomy’s “second fundamental technology” – IDOL itself being the first. That’s quite a claim and we’re endeavoring to find out more and will report back as to exactly how it works and what it can do.
Overall though this is part of a push by companies like Autonomy, but also Attivio, Endeca, Exalead and some others into the search-based application market. The underlying premise of that market is database offloading; the idea of using a search engine rather than a relational database to sort and query information. It holds great promise, partly because it is the bridge between enterprise search and business intelligence but also because of the prospect of cost savings for customers as they can either freeze their investments in relational database licenses, reduce them, or even eliminate them.
Of course if the enterprise search licenses then get so expensive as to nullify the cost benefit, then customers will reject the idea, which is something of which search vendors need to be wary.
Users can apply to joint the beta program at a very non-Autonomy looking website.
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5 comments ↓
Hi Nick,
RDBMS’s will continue to be used to contain unstructured data as BLOBs, obviously. But, perhaps the more valuable (or at least commonly used) data in databases are still in structured records and not contained in BLOBs. It appears that Autonomy’s proposition is somewhat different than Exaleads. Autonomy is positioning their product more as a data-mining or decision management (a la Fair Isaac) solution. There’s already some very strong competitors in those domains. At Exalead, while we think there’s a market for data mining and decision management, we also see another segment of the ‘database offloading’ market that is less about data mining, and more about faster, easier retrieval of database records for less hardware cost. More of an everyday kind of application. An example would be GEFCO that uses Exalead to track hundreds of thousands of vehicles everyday as they travel from manufacturer to car dealership. In this case Exalead indexes, mashes-up and presents structured tracking records froman underlying RDBMS using a single search box UI that is easily used by large communities of non-technical users. Different than data mining or decision management and perhaps more broadly usable.
thanks for this page
The quote from CEO Mike Lynch grandly proclaims this to be Autonomy’s “second fundamental technology” – IDOL itself being the first. That’s quite a claim and we’re endeavoring to find out more and will report back as to exactly how it works and what it can do.
thanks a lot
Of course if the enterprise search licenses then get so expensive as to nullify the cost benefit, then customers will reject the idea, which is something of which search vendors need to be wary.
its good
thanks
Of course if the enterprise search licenses then get so expensive as to nullify the cost benefit, then customers will reject the idea, which is something of which search vendors need to be wary.
its good
thanks