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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
September 06, 2006

Table of Contents

Try A Vertical Web Search Engine Designed For IT Professionals
Joining Us This Week in the Demo Center
Lycos Partners with blinkx for Broadband Search
Endeca Opens New Corporate Headquarters
Nstein Launches UIMA Annotators
E-mail news from IBM & Microsoft
Smooth sailing on the next BI wave
SearchInform Launches New Version
Link-Assistant Releases SEO Tool
NewsStand Division Launches LibreDigital Warehouse

Try A Vertical Web Search Engine Designed For IT Professionals

By special arrangemend with IT.Com, Enterprise Search Center is pleased to offer you the ability to search for news, companies, white papers, and/or Webcasts on any Information Technology (IT) subject of interest to you. Just go to the ESCenter home page and use the IT.Com search box at the top of the page. Results are displayed in columnar format, with answers listed by type (news, companies, white papers, and Webcasts).   Vertical search is hot. IT.Com's solution is cool. Check it out.

About IT.comâ„¢  

"We built IT.com to help technology buyers find the best solutions available on the Web—objectively and comprehensively. Unlike directories that only include those vendors who've paid to be listed, or horizontal search engines that dredge the entire Internet with every search, IT.com's vertical search engine delivers natural, relevant results focused exclusively on enterprise IT.

"In a world where search is often inextricably entangled with marketing, IT.com's search engine imposes no hidden, advertisement-driven order on the results it returns. Instead, IT.com uses a special algorithm called dynamic peer ranking to order its results. This algorithm replicates how a large community of buyers judges each vendor's position in the market, so you know the results you see are untainted by marketing bias.

"To ensure that your results are as relevant as possible, we "tune" IT.com's vertical search engine to even more specific topics within IT. Instead of casting their net over the entire space of IT, technology buyers can instruct our search engine to look within, for example, RFID or IT security, optimizing their search from the very beginning.

"By focusing our search engine's scope and ranking results as your trusted colleagues and friends would, IT.com creates an unprecedented tool that puts buyers' interests first in the search for enterprise IT solutions."

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Joining Us This Week in the Demo Center

Today we welcome SearchInform to the ESCenter Demo Center. A flash demo and links are provided. Other demos available at this time are: Groxis, Siderean, exalead, Vivisimo, Coveo, Thunderstone, Synomia, Northern Light, Mondosoft, and Isys. Check them all out at the Enterprise Search Center Web site. Just click on the Demo Center navigation bar item or on the Featured Demo logos on the Home Page.

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Lycos Partners with blinkx for Broadband Search

LYCOS, Inc., an entertainment destination for creators and consumers of content, and blinkx, a video search engine, have announced the launch of the new LYCOS broadband search experience. Visitors to LYCOS can find broader search results from blinkx's index of more than five million hours of searchable video content, including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, video blogs, and more. Under the terms of the LYCOS blinkx alliance, both companies will share revenue generated from search results.

(www.lycos.com; www.blinkx.tv)

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Endeca Opens New Corporate Headquarters

Endeca, an information access company, has announced plans to open its new worldwide corporate headquarters at 101 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the heart of Kendall Square. The opening of the new headquarters, planned for the fourth quarter of the year, comes after several years of office and geographical expansion.

(www.endeca.com)

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Nstein Launches UIMA Annotators

Nstein Technologies Inc., a provider of text mining and multilingual information access solutions, has announced the launch of 12 annotators, compliant with the open-source Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard developed by IBM. The UIMA standard provides the foundation for new search-related applications that extract hidden meaning from unstructured information. Nstein's annotators are designed to allow organizations adopting the UIMA standard to expand their content discovery capabilities associated with market intelligence, customer intelligence, and early warning applications.

Nstein's topic-based categorization annotators are now available for the automated tagging of concepts, names of people and organizations, geographic locations, dates, and currencies in unstructured documents. Sentiment-based categorization annotators are also available for the tagging of objective and subjective statements in documents, as well as overall negative or positive statements. Other annotators launched by Nstein include fact finding annotating facts related to human resources movements (hiring, firing, promotion) as well as financial information (mergers and acquisitions, investments, etc.).

(www.nstein.com)

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E-mail news from IBM & Microsoft

Heavyweights Microsoft and IBM have made recent announcements in the e-mail archiving/management market space, which means that managing and searching e-mail has officially become a serious business.

To this point, the market has been characterized by a plethora of small, aggressive companies like ZipLip, Zantaz, Fortiva and Postini, and larger storage-oriented firms like EMC and Plasmon. E-mail volumes in organizations are massive and growing, adding to the storage burden that they face. According to Forrester Research, enterprise data is growing as much as 150 percent annually, with some companies seeing their data double or more each year.

IBM is releasing CommonStore eMail Archiving Preload, which is aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMB) and positioned to help resellers more easily install an e-mail archiving solution. Smaller customers often have a limited IT staff and budget, so the new solution will help them comply with regulatory and governance demands while supporting litigation readiness.

CommonStore eMail Archiving Preload works with Exchange and Lotus Notes to provide e-mail search, storage and management functionality. Built on an AMD Opteron-powered blade server, it provides preloaded, pretested IBM CommonStore and Content Manager Enterprise Edition software on a System x platform, powered by AMD processors. CommonStore provides the Tivoli Storage Manager and the WebSphere Application Server to complete the e-mail archive management requirements. IBM states that its new software, E-Mail Search for CommonStore, will benefit any SMB that has rapidly growing e-mail archives and a need to retrieve an archived item on request. The solution provides e-mail archiving and retrieval while removing the load on native messaging servers. It can place e-mails on hold to prevent any time-based disposition of them as set by the sender.

Pete Peterson, VP of systems product marketing for Tech Data, an IBM business partner, says, "The IBM e-mail archiving solution helps resellers quickly deploy and capitalize on the growing demand for more efficient e-mail storage and management among their small and midsize customers."

Microsoft is introducing unified messaging support in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, which marks the start of the third wave of unified messaging technology: interoperable, server-based tools that integrate with desktop and mobile clients to give information workers access to voice, fax and e-mail data from wherever they are, and to allow people to use the telephone to manage their e-mail, calendar and personal contacts.

Microsoft believes the solution will reduce costs and save users time in locating information, because they will have just one inbox with "anywhere access" from a variety of mobile devices.

According to Keith McCall, CTO of Azaleos, the biggest problem with Exchange is that it is not SQL-based, but still based on the decade-old JET database, which does sequential reads and random writes. Because a search query has to read through data in sequential order, but the data it's looking for has been written in multiple places on a disk at random, searches for information within Exchange can be costly in system resources and time-consuming. McCall says, "With a 4K block size, that's quite a few writes to be searching for."

Ray Mohrman, technical product manager of Exchange for Microsoft, says customers have been increasingly voicing the idea of a move to SQL as the basis for the Exchange database. "We've heard a lot of requests from customers for improvements to the core of Exchange, and a lot of them want a switch to SQL," he says. "[But] when it came to Exchange 2007, people were really looking for increased stability and higher availability. We found we could deliver those capabilities and do so sooner by adding features to this newest release rather than overhauling the database." Mohrman adds, however, that the next move for Exchange could be to a SQL platform. "With some of the features we've already added, we're in a better position to move to the SQL server," he says. "We've integrated more of SQL Server's text search engines. We're continuing to look toward that option for the Exchange store."

"It doesn't matter whether they change the database," says Andrew Lockhart, director of marketing for Postini, another e-mail outsourcing service provider. "The broader issue is unrelated to how the database is designed--it's that users don't want to throw away any e-mail anymore."

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Smooth sailing on the next BI wave

IDC's Dan Vessett and Brian McDonough have just released a report that paints an intriguing and optimistic view of the worldwide business intelligence (BI) market. Last year, license and maintenance revenue jumped to $5.7 billion, an 11.5 percent increase over the previous year. They expect growth to continue for the next 15 years.

McDonough and Vessett explain that the business intelligence market follows 15-year cycles, and another one began in 2005. The first, from 1975 to 1990, was followed by what they call the "modern era" and marked by user-friendlier client/server-based BI tools. From now until 2020, they see investment growing, centered on expanding the reach of business intelligence to more users, both inside and outside the organization, and further automating the decision-making process.

Additionally, BI vendors will concentrate on developing tools to match operational needs, pointing out that about 40 percent of the organizations they studied suffer negative impacts from even a few hours of down time of their BI systems. So, to meet the challenge in the new BI environment, software will become more scalable (to serve increasingly more users) and further evolve from reporting and analysis into fundamental operational systems.

KMWorld has noted regularly that search and discovery vendors have been expanding their offerings to mine unstructured data to deliver structured reports and analysis. It's no surprise, then, that another trend of this new wave of BI will venture into the world of unstructured information. The authors see unstructured content access and analysis as an integral part of BI's new mission.

If you'll indulge me just a bit, the next wave of BI will embrace the spirit and sensibility of knowledge management, because the authors note that some of the new BI applications will likely mirror what are currently viewed as "collaborative communities" and include visualization capabilities with tables, search, comments, notes, ratings and other features. They point out, as well, that the familiar search interface will likely further encourage new users, who previously required BI training. They add, "As such, the search technology has the potential to displace traditional BI tools in certain ad hoc analysis and information retrieval use cases."

We probably all agree that there are too many business abbreviations--and too much jargon--"out there," but here's a term worth remembering, one that we'll likely be hearing a whole lot about as the new business intelligence takes further hold: intelligent process automation (IPA), a term coined by IDC to describe the marriage of business intelligence and business process automation. IPA will automate repeatable, operational decisions for performance management and compliance issues--after all, BI has always been about improving the decision-making process. The authors emphasize the repeatable nature of intelligent process automation because in no way is it intended to replace strategic, executive-level decisions.

I wish we had permission (and room) to describe the BI vendor analysis that Vessett and McDonough performed--it's the single most enlightening description I've ever seen of the unique strengths--and weaknesses--the top vendors bring to the market. [FYI: Business Objects comes in number 1 in market share, SAS Institute number 2 and Cognos number 3, as they have since 2003.]

What's mentioned above is a mere surface-scratch of the full study, but it's a decent indicator of what we can expect from solutions that have done so much heavy, if awkward, lifting behind the scenes. The new BI will be much more visible, embracing vast numbers of new users--from both inside and outside the enterprise.

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SearchInform Launches New Version

SearchInform Technologies, an operator in the area of information technologies with focus on searching, storing, and processing information, has announced the release of SearchInform 2.3.01, a program of full text search and search of documents of similar content. The new version's indexation process is improved and the list of mail clients accessible for indexing was extended.

SearchInform 2.3.01 main functions include phrase search with attention to stemming and synonyms dictionary, a SearchInform technology of similar document search, high indexing speed (from 15 to 30 GB/hour), index size of no more than 15-25% of the actual text information volume, support of 50 text file formats, electronic messages Outlook and TheBat, mp3 and avi tags, Microsoft Instant Messenger and ICQ logs, and operations with archives and universal data sources (indexing of DBMS fields and information systems).

(www.searchinform.com)

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Link-Assistant Releases SEO Tool

Link-Assistant, a software company with a focus on developing solutions for the SEO industry, has announced the release of LinkAssistant SEO tool product. LinkAssistant 2.3.2 gives users the tools to manage link-building campaigns, increase site's link popularity, improve Google rankings, and drive traffic to the site.

LinkAssistant focuses on finding link partners, contacting them, creating custom link directories and making them available online to monitoring the back links, and search engines positions. LinkAssistant 2.3.2 costs $99.95 for the full version, and users can manage a number of sites with no extra charge.

Readers can use a special coupon code to get a 20% discount on the full version of LinkAssistant. The offer is valid within 30 days. For more information on the product and free coupon code, please visit the company's website.

(www.Link-Assistant.com)

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NewsStand Division Launches LibreDigital Warehouse

LibreDigital, a new division of NewsStand, Inc., has launched a service that allows book publishers to digitally capture and deliver controlled book content online. The new LibreDigital Warehouse service enables publishers to bring titles to the web, where consumers can search the entire content of a book and preview a percentage of its text and illustrations. This is made possible using the ASP-based LibreDigital Warehouse solution, to allow publishers looking to simplify internet distribution and partner management, while providing secure, controlled online content to help sell books to consumers.

The LibreDigital Warehouse service enables book publishers to display content online in a searchable format, while maintaining controls over digital rights and permissions. As part of the service, LibreDigital can digitize book content, make the content viewable on websites anywhere in the world, and directly interface with search engines and online booksellers. Features offered by LibreDigital include content digitization, asset ingest, automated tagging, digital rights management, digital content display, search, and page view control. After digitizing a book's content using LibreDigital technology, publishers can provide their distributors and consumers a way to search and virtually preview book content online.

(www.libredigital.com; www.newsstand.com)

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