Entries Tagged 'Text analysis' ↓

As a follow-up to Matt’s post last week showing where he’ll be speaking during Q4, here’s some more updates of other in the information management team speaking at various events this quarter.

First up I’m chairing and speaking at IQPC’s Enterprise Information Management Exchange in London on October 10-11. I’m speaking to a mainly C-level end user audience about information risk management, moderating a panel on  how to make the most of your information assets and brushing off my MC-ing skills to keep the whole show moving along.

Next up I’ll be back in NYC at Text Analytics World giving a slightly shorter version of a similar presentation on October 19 (which I’ll be refining and also presenting at Predictive Analytics World in London on November 30).

On October 24 I’m on the opening panel of Enterprise Search Europe, discussing the issues brought up by the keynote presentation by Funnelback’s David Hawking, among other things

On October 27 David Horrigan will be attending Guidance Software’s Federal Summit in Washington, DC where he’ll be moderating a panel called e-Discovery in the cloud. This is an invite-only one being handled by Guidance, so I don’t have a link unfortunately.

Into November and I’ll be attending the e-Discovery and e-Investigations Forum in London on November 10. There I’ll be discussing the choice available to end users in e-Discovery in a session called: A buyers guide to navigating the info management and e-discovery technology marketplace.’

The following week I’ll be in Munich at IQPC’s Information Retention & e-Discovery Exchange where I’m sitting on a couple of panels – one on social media in e-Discovery and another on technology in this area.

Finally this quarter  Kathleen Reidy will be attending Gilbane’s annual gathering of enterprise content management mavens where she’s moderating a panel entitled ‘Get Ready for Big Data.’

We hope to see some of you at one or more of these events in Q4.

Just after the HP call about its Q3 numbers and the deal, here’s my initial (very) quick take as it’s late here in London:

• This deal is about getting serious about software under Leo Apotheker. It gives HP a real information management story, greatly boosting its presence in the archiving, e-Discovery and enterprise search businesses.
• However, company cultures are not complementary, the HP way is a long way from the hyper-aggressive sales and marketing culture at Autonomy. Maintaining Autonomy as a separate entity run by Mike Lynch proves this and calls into question how much real synergy can be had from such a structure. I cannot see that being sustained.
• This instantly makes HP a bigger e-Discovery player than IBM or any of the major IT firms.
• Product overlap exists in document and records management but gets HP into the web content management and website optimization markets.
• Autonomy has resisted deals over the years as its market capitalization ballooned as it went on its own acquisition binge. Autonomy couldn’t have waited much longer as it would have grown too big to be swallowed by even the largest predator.
• At least Autonomy customers will now have a services organization to call on after they’ve bought the software. Customer support and after sales service has not been a strength of Autonomy.
• This leaves the FTSE 100 with just one software firm of note.

The 451 Group is holding two conference in London later this month.

The first is our European client event, which is being held on Monday June 27 and features three analyst presentations and one from Steve O’Connor, Director of Technology for Parliamentary ICT at the UK Houses of Parliament. The full agenda is here.

Two of the presentations are specifically  focused on information management. Matt Aslett is presenting on Total Data, our take on the the increasing volume and variety of data, combined with a greater understanding about its potential value. I’ll be preceding Matt with an overview of information risk management as we see it, focusing on how the increase in information volume and variety heightens the risk environment and what some companies have done to tackle it. Clients of 451 Group can come to the conference at no extra charge as it is included in the price of their annual relationships with us. Non-clients can also come for a fee, please email me for details

The following two days – Tuesday June 28 and Wednesday June 29 are focused on hosting and cloud issues with our Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS). The agenda features a wide variety of speaker, both from 451 Group and from numerous end users in markets including financial services, government, media, telecommunications and transportation.

The highlight for many will likely be listening to, and asking questions of, Professor Brian Cox, the Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University and one of the leaders on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. In the UK he is well known for two massively popular science programmes, Wonders of the Solar System and, in 2011, Wonders of the Universe, the first of which is also now on in the US on the Science Channel. He will be talking about all the things that interest him, and there will be ample time for Q&A.

Seats are selling fast and 451 clients who attend the client event get a discount to HCTS. We also have some discount codes avaiable, so if you’re not a client and would like to attend, please get in touch via email or Twitter (@NickPatience).

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

On Tuesday March 8 I’m doing a webinar along with Isys Search Software and Sybase about text-aware applications. The full title is “Text-Aware Software Solutions: What Defines Excellence?”

‘Text-aware applications’ is a phrase we coined back in 2005 as part of the process of writing a major report on the subject in which we looked at the various application areas (CRM, ERP, BI etc) that could benefit from a deep understanding of unstructured data.

As the first key finding from the report said:

The future success of companies and organizations will increasingly be based on their ability to unlock hidden intelligence and value from unstructured data, and text in particular.

The webinar on March 8 looks at the role of document filters in making applications text-aware, which is something I’ve talked about here before.

It’s at 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm UK. You can register here.

Our clients will have seen our preview of 2011 last week. For those that aren’t (yet!) clients and therefore can’t see the whole 3,500-word report, here’s the introduction, followed by the titles of the sections to give you an idea of what we think will shape the information management market in 2011 and beyond. Of course the IT industry, like most others doesn’t rigorously follow the wiles of the Gregorian calendar, so some of these things will happen next year while others may not occur till 2012 and beyond. But happen they will, we believe.

We think information governance will play a more prominent role in 2011 and in the years beyond that. Specifically, we think master data management and data governance applications will appear in 2011 to replace the gaggle of spreadsheets, dashboards and scorecards commonly used today. Beyond that, we think information governance will evolve in the coming years, kick-started by end users who are asking for a more coherent way to manage their data, driven in part by their experience with the reactive and often chaotic nature of e-discovery.

In e-discovery itself, we expect to see a twin-track adoption trend. While cloud-based products have proven popular, at the same time, more enterprises buy e-discovery appliances.

‘Big data’ has become a bit of a catchall term to describe the masses of information being generated, but in 2011 we expect to see a shift to what we term a ‘total data’ approach to data management, as well as the analytics applications and tools that enable users to generate the business intelligence from their big data sets. Deeper down, the tools used in this process will include new BI tools to exploit Hadoop, as well as a push in predictive analytics beyond the statisticians and into finance, marketing and sales departments.

SharePoint 2010 may have come out in the year for which it is named, but its use will become truly widespread in 2011 as the first service pack is release and the ISV community around it completes their updates from SharePoint 2007. However, we don’t think cloud-based SharePoint will grow quite as fast as some people may expect. Finally, in the Web content management (WCM) market – so affected by SharePoint, as well as the open source movement – we expect a stratification between the everyday WCM-type scenario and Web experience management (WEM) for those organization that need to tie WCM, Web analytics, online marketing and commerce features together.

• Governance family reunion: Information governance, meet governance, risk and compliance; meet data governance….
• Master data management, data quality, data integration: the road to data governance
• E-discovery post price war: affordable enough, or still too strategic to risk?
• Data management – big, bigger, biggest
• Putting the BI into big data in Hadoop
• The business of predictive analytics
• SharePoint 2010 gets real in 2011
• WCM, WEM and stratification

And with that we’d like to wish all readers of Too Much Information a happy holiday season and a healthy and successful 2011.

Katey and I are doing a few webinars at the moment and I’m also speaking at a conference this week, so I just wanted to round them all up here:

One webinar is already in the bag, which Katey did with Digital Reef & legal service provider Precise-Law, entitled ‘The challenges of a  reactive vs. proactive EDRM in the Enterprise.’ A replay is available here.

I’m speaking at Search Solutions 2010 this week  on Oct 21. It’s a one-day event organized by the British Computer Society, which I attended last year as a non-speaker and it was very good, so I hope to be able to contribute to maintaining that high standard! I’m speaking at 11.45 am on ‘The trends shaping the future of enterprise search 2010-2013’ and then I’m participating on a panel at the end of the day on what search will look like in 2015. As I’m already making predictions through 2013, I’m three-fifths of the way there! Oct 21 is also the day of Autonomy’s Q3 results call so the place should be full of lively discussion regarding that.

Come November I’m doing a couple more webinars:

On Nov 11 I’m participating on one with Zylab, the focus of which will be litigation-readiness, moving beyond just eDiscovery to insuring organizations have their information in a state such that it can be easily searched, accessed, locked down, deleted or produced to an opposing party.

Also in November I’ll be participating in a webinar with Attensity Group, which will be focused on social media and the application of text analytics to that space. Date TBC and links to follow, most likely on my Twitter feed.

Clients of 451 will have seen our report yesterday on Autonomy’s Q2 and 1H10 results. I won’t repeat it all here but in it we looked at the some of the more puzzling aspects of the company’s numbers. These include:

• Organic growth:  “IDOL product” revenue of $62m this time was in contrast to $47m in Q1. It said at the time of the Q1 results on April 21 that it had $10m of hardware inventory, which most understood to be its Arcpliance archiving and ECA appliance. It said it had already sold most of that in Q2. That is a new product, so if that $10m is removed from the $62m (since it’s recognized as up-front license revenue), and a little bit more is taken off for sales to federal government via the recently-acquired MicroLink (Autonomy trumpeted a multimillion dollar federal deal in Q2), then you get very close to the $47m figure from Q1, and thus, next to no organic growth. That compares to the company’s claim of 19% organic growth for IDOL in the quarter and 13% across all products and services.
• Cloud & SaaS & hosting: Autonomy gives out some seemingly helpful but often confusing metrics in terms of its product breakdowns. It said  SaaS-based revenue accounted for more than one-quarter of the company’s revenue in the first half. fair enough, and pretty interesting. But it also attributed revenues of $47m (out of $211.6M in total) to what it calls “IDOL cloud.” That’s 22%. However that isn’t one of the terms used in the way Autonomy packages its products so it’s hard to tell what it is. For instance, how much of ‘IDOL cloud’ is Zantaz’s hosted archiving product isn’t clear.
• Services: It puzzles me how a company selling a product that is powerful, but complex to implement, as Autonomy is, can make do with next to no professional services, instead relying almost solely on partners. This tends to leave customers – especially those spending less than $1m with the company – with a lot of integration work on their hands. It also puzzles us when it goes and picks up a service firm like MicroLink, paying $55m for assets it says are worth $1m with the rest being goodwill (as it disclosed in Q2’s results).
• OEM: The company said that OEM is its fastest growing revenue stream. It should also be noted that Autonomy sells two main products via its OEM channel. One is IDOL, the core search and categorization engine. The other is KeyView, the set of file filters it got with its acquisition of Verity almost five years ago. The former costs a lot more than the latter, and once the customer has implemented it, the former is a lot harder to replace than the latter. Nevertheless, when Autonomy announces a new OEM customer or a renewal, it usually doesn’t differentiate between these two. Incidentally it made a bold claim on the call yesterday, namely that almost all the major archiving vendors are OEM customers of Autonomy, which means all its main competitors in that space as it’s very much an archiving vendor too. In cases like that it’s quite important to distinguish between OEMing IDOL and OEMing KeyView as the former is much more of a differentiator than the latter.

There’s more in the report but mainly in the form of other things that puzzle me about these numbers, rather than a list of answers. Still, another acquisition is sure to come along soon  and change the picture again.

Newssift, which was set up by the FT Search unit within the Financial Times and launched in March 2009 was shut down recently after just a few months in full operation. We looked  at it from time and time and obviously looked at it closely at launch time, talked to the executive in charge of it (who also appears to have left the FT) and to most of the vendors that supplied the technology – namely Endeca, Lexalytics, Nstein and Reel Two.

But the fact that people like us only looked at it from time was indicative of the problems the site apparently had. According to a source at one of the technology suppliers, the site was sticky once people had stayed around on it for the first time, but  those new users were hard to come by and those that didn’t persist that first time didn’t find a reason to come back.

But Newssift’s loss is a bit of a blow to those in the text analysis industry, as it was supposed to be a flagship application of the technology, brought to market by one of the pre-eminent publishers in the world. That combination apparently wasn’t enough to make it succeed.

The thing that reminded us to look at it was yesterday’s acquisition of Nstein technologies by fellow Canadian content management player (and roll-up machine) Open Text for $35m, which seems to be a case primarily of Open Text consolidating its industry as long as it can get a good price, rather than being a deal for customers or technology.

We probably should have been using Newssift daily rather than relying on M&A to jog our memory as to its existence. But we weren’t, and now it’s gone .

Most of the information management team are attending the 4th annual 451 client event, which takes place in Boston next week, November 2-3, so I thought I’d let you know what we’re up to.

Four of us are presenting, here’s the dates/times (all ET) and themes:

• Nov 3, 3.30-4.15: Matt Aslett – Open source to the rescue?

Can open source really help enterprises cut costs and ride out the economic storm? What has been the impact of current conditions on open source adoption? How is this being reflected in the business strategies of vendors – both open source specialists and traditional proprietary vendors?

• Nov 4, 11.00-11.45: Nick Patience & Kathleen Reidy – E-Discovery to Information Governance: From Reactive, Unavoidable Cost to Proactive Cost-Avoidance.

E-discovery is a market without a lot of discretionary spending – legal events and investigations occur, and require that organizations produce relevant electronic information, no matter the difficulties or costs. This fact has driven lots of vendors from various sectors to the e-discovery (also known as e-disclosure) market: it is driving business in the archiving, enterprise content management and enterprise search markets, as organizations want to figure out how to better prepare for litigation before it occurs.

• Nov 4, 11.45-12.30: Simon Robinson –  Storage Technology Is Thriving in the Economic Downturn

The economy is shrinking, but data is growing. Almost universally, storage vendors claim they can help IT ‘do more with less’ by squeezing more value out of storage assets to meet rampant data growth and stiffer retention criteria. This presentation will examine how three key trends in storage innovation – optimization, unification and the cloud – are helping some storage vendors thrive in this uncertain climate. The session will conclude with a vendor panel discussion.

Henry Baltazar is also attending and we’re all avaiable for 1:1s, though some of our days are getting pretty near to full. Contact your account rep about booking a slot.

If you are a client and you’re not attending then you’re missing out on one of the key beneifts of being a client!

If you’re not a client and you wish to attend, you can do that too, only you’ll have to pay to get in. Either way, you can register here.

Beyond information management all our other themes will be address including cloud (a lot!), security, virtualization, eco-efficient IT and our popular M&A panel, which always comes right before cocktails on day 1.

See you there!