10 Trends – with Muse in the Middle

Today's eWeek online version, 2012-02-20, contains a story, Cloud Computing and Data Integration: 10 Trends to Watch, within its "Cloud" section seemingly written around the capabilities of Muse. Or, perhaps MuseGlobal has been developing capabilities within its flagship software platform which fit the "waves of the future" now starting to break on the shore of today's business needs.

The story is one of the familiar 10 slide shows in which they distill the wisdom of their in-house experts and those of external tech watchers – in this case some Gartner – and an interested developer, to gaze into a particular tech crystal ball. This one is focused on business needs and the cloud. In their own words:

Increasingly, large organizations are discovering and using enterprise information with the objective of growing or transforming their business as they seek more holistic approaches to their data integration and data management practices. This is all in an effort to address the challenges associated with the growing volume, variety, velocity and complexity of information. ... intensifying expectations for cloud data integration and data management as a part of a company's information infrastructure. ... to enable a more agile, quicker and more cost-effective response to business needs. ...eWEEK spoke to Robert Fox, of Liaison Technologies.

So what are the trends (details in the eWeek article)? And how does Muse fit in those trends?

EAI in the Cloud

Muse provides a cloud based service enabling standards based systems and those with proprietary messaging protocols to communicate with each other. This is a hub-and-spoke architecture, so once an application has its Connector written, it can communicate with ALL the other applications working with that Muse hub.

B2C Will Drive B2B Agility

Not so obvious here, but Muse has Connectors for access to the major, and quite a few minor, social platforms, so including their information and practices in the B2B world should be that much easier.

Data as a Service in the Cloud

Where service providers gather information and data from disparate sources, merge it, de-dupe it, cleanse it, and hand it on the service user, Muse is an obvious platform with all of these capabilities baked in from the first batch. Increasing numbers of data providers and the rise of the data brokers, means Muse has a niche as the functional platform for these new providers.

Integration Platform as a Service

"Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) allows companies to create data transformation and translation in the cloud ..." I couldn't have put it closer to the core of what Muse does, if I had said it myself!

Master Data Management in the Cloud

Aggregation, de-duplication, transformation, normalization, conformance to standards (local and International), consistency, identification of differences, enrichment, delivery – this could again be a description of a Muse harvesting service. Right here when needed.

Data Governance in the Cloud

Not directly a Muse function, but its transaction and processing logs make provenance and quality of data easier to report on and find the areas of weakness.

Data Security in the Cloud

Secure communications, a sophisticated range of authentication options, encryption when needed, and NO intermediate storage of the data means that Muse as a transaction service is not the weak security link in the chain.

Business Process Modeling in the Cloud

Not a core strength of Muse – can't win them all. But complex data manipulation processes can be handled through scripting within Muse. Connection to and from external service platforms means that they can be allowed to control the modeling and allow Muse to deal with the data.

Business Activity Monitoring in the Cloud

Tie Muse's aggregation and data cleansing to a link with your favorite BI service and monitoring became rather easier. Because Muse links to systems, it will work with virtually any BI system and place the raw data and analyses wherever they are needed for review.

Cloud Services Brokerage

If this sounds like your business (or one you want to get into), then a look at the Muse platform could save a lot of time and effort to get a superior service up and running. As the technology behind a CSB it takes some beating!

So how did Muse do? Seven right on the money and three near misses seems like a pretty high score to us.

Will Hybrid Search get you better mileage?

The recent news of the acquisition of Endeca by Oracle has triggered a number of research notes by analysts. In particular Sue Feldman of IDC talked of the rise of a Hybrid Search architecture. What is it? Is it good for you? Should you have one? And where does MuseGlobal stand?

Sue defined Hybrid Search: “Search vendors perceived this logical progression in information access a number of years ago, and several were at the forefront of creating new, hybrid architectures to enable access to both structured and unstructured information from a single access point.”

She went on to point out that the new hybrid architecture was more comprehensive; “The new hybrid architectures incorporate the speed and immediacy of search with the analysis and reporting features of BI.” and to find a justification for it – “the enterprise of the future will be information centered, and will require an agile,adaptable infrastructure to monitor and mine information as it flows into the company.”

Nick Patience and Brenon Daly of 451 Research went on to define The hybrid architecture’s capabilities in a bit more detail for Endeca’s version: “Endeca’s underlying technology is called MDEX, which is a hybrid search and analytics database used for the exploration, search and analysis of data. The MDEXengine is designed to handle unstructured data – e.g., text, semi-structured content involving data sources that have metadata such as XML files, and structured data – in a database or application.”

These definitions acknowledge the growing importance of information from everywhere, in unstructured as well as structured form, and the need to be able to access and analyze it in the modern enterprise. Information can, and does, come from anywhere – internal CRM systems, company independent blogs and forums, totally differentiated social media such as blogs and tweets, competitor websites, news services, and even raw data repositories. And it comes in the form of database records, blogs, emails, tweets, images and more. In the modern enterprise the need is to be able to analyze and use all this information immediately and easily.

Mining information from these disparate sources is not something that business analysts or product managers should be spending their time on. They need a reliable supply of the information where the semantics can be trusted, the information is up-to-date, and where the analyses can be set up easily. This is where the “plumbing” comes in. Two stages are involved: gathering the information, analyzing the information, then the user can take action on the intelligence provided. Companies like MuseGlobal take care of the first stage, and repository and BI companies take care of the second.

Some companies, like Endeca, take care of both stages, but then you are locked into both products from a single vendor, and it is not usual that they are both “best of breed”. So MuseGlobal concentrates on what it does best – gathering, normalizing, mining and performing simple analytics on data - and seamlessly passes the information on to your choice of Data Warehouse, Repository, BI, analytics engine – whatever best suites the company’s needs.

What this means is that your organization sets up a Muse harvesting and/or Federated Search system once, pointing to the desired Sources of data, configures authentication where needed, and determines how the results are to be delivered to the analysis engine, specifying a choice of standards based or proprietary protocols and formats. Adding new Sources (or removing unwanted ones) is a point and click operation, and the Muse Automatic Source Update mechanism (and our programmers and analysts) ensures the connections remain working even when the sources change their characteristics – or even their address! About as close to “set and forget” as you can get in this changing world.

On schedule, or when requested by users, the data pours out of Muse in a consistent standardized format, with normalized semantics and even added enrichments and extracted “entities” or “facets” (Endeca’s terminology) and heads to the next stage of the information stack. This raw and analysed data input means the BI system (or whatever is in use) can now deliver more comprehensive analyses so staff can now concentrate on the information they have in front of them, not on seeking it in bits and pieces from all over the place.

And the information is not only from many sources, it is in varied formats. Forrester have just released a report which asks the questions “Have you noticed how search engine results pages are now filled with YouTube videos, images, and rich media links? Every day, the search experience is becoming more and more display-like, meaning marketers must align their search and display marketing strategies and tactics.” So the need to handle a complete range of media types and convoluted structures is becoming paramount or the received data will be just the small amount of text left over from the rich feast of the retrieved results. This is a topic for another blog, but suffice it to say that Muse can deliver the videos as well as the text.

HP to acquire Autonomy

The news

Hewlett-Packard announced on August 18^th an agreement to purchase Autonomy. Autonomy has moved beyond its original enterprise search capabilities by utilizing its IDOL (Integrated Data Operating Layer) as the forward looking platform to provide an information bus to integrate other activities. It now handles content management, analytics, and disparate connectors, as well as advanced searching, to provide users access to data gathered from multiple sources and fitting to their needs. It has also moved aggressively to the cloud and currently nearly 2/3 of its sales are for cloud services.

The impact on MuseGlobal

This is a major endorsement for MuseGlobal’s technology, with its functionality to break down the barriers between silos of information in the enterprise as well as elsewhere. In the words of the IDC analysts (ref below):

“…to a new IT infrastructure that integrates both unstructured and structured information. These newer technologies enable enterprises to forage for relationships in information that exist in separate silos…”

They call this integration a “tipping point” and see that it is a means for a new lease of life for HP in the data management and services area. Again according to IDC it provides:

“A modular platform that can aggregate, normalize, index, search and query, analyze, visualize and deliver all types of information from legacy and current information sources will support a new kind of software application”

Although Autonomy will bring significant revenue and a large cloud footprint to HP, the major imagined benefit is seem in its ability to aggregate, normalize, analyze and distribute information across an enterprise. This is an area where MuseGlobal’s Muse system with its ICE “bus” provides a very similar set of functionality with its Connectors (6,000+ and growing), Data Model and semantically aware record conversion, and entity extraction analysis, providing similar functionality – if not content management or enterprise search. Muse is also very strong in record enrichment so that virtual records can be provided both ad hoc and on a regular “harvested” basis to connected processing systems – such as content management or enterprise search.

Various commentators suggest that this move may “encourage” the other big players who HP competes against to have a look at acquisitions of their own. OpenText is the most noted possibility, though Endeca and Vivisimo get a mention. MuseGlobal is certainly in the same functional ballpark providing functionality for enterprises, universities, libraries, public safety, and news media.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/making-sense-of-hps-autonomy-acquisition/3345

HP to Acquire Autonomy: Bold Move Supports Leo Apotheker's Shift to Software

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/after-h-p-s-rich-offer-deal-making-spotlight-swings-to-data-analysis/

Social is taking Search in a more Democratic direction...

Totally agree with this article published on Vator.tv.

We definitely saw this trend over the last few quarters as "social communities" emerged and relevant content started to show up in these communities without a lot of effort by an individual member.

Our nRich product offers relevant content from trusted sources as well as its social rank. Gaming - like what JC Penny or Overstock tried - is not a big factor because other community members have already done the initial filtering.

Check out the demo here.

Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data

Enjoyed reading this interview in Wired magazine with noted science author James Gleick.

He quoted Claude Shannon's views on information:

A string of bits has a quantity, whether it represents something that’s true, something that’s utterly false, or something that’s just meaningless nonsense.

He also made a very succint comment about how he (and perhaps more of us) should look at new technology:

When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There’s a delicate balance.

Here's the link to the interview.

NLP based Search in the middle of Man vs Machine battle

IBM's Watson takes on Jeopardy champions tonight.

Interesting article by Bruce Upbin

Here's a brief video to give you the background.

Looking forward to it.

IDC - Desperately Seeking Differentiation

I got a chance to attend an IDC event last week where they shared their predictions for the Software market and discussed how companies can establish differentiation in 2011 and beyond.

Key themes:

1. Cloud/Near-Cloud - Differentiation by delivery model. [Not surprising. This is a well establish trend now.]
2. Mobile apps/Platform - Differentiation by Platform. [This is a significant trend and one whose impact will be felt for a number of years as a lot of applications will be re-built for the mobile platform. And not necessarily by the original owners. This will be very disruptive.]
3. Social Business - Differentiation by business process. [This is very interesting one as long as you are willing to open your mind to ideas from other people. Very disruptive internally, because you cannot control what/when/why conversations are happening - good or bad. So for paranoid people - this isn't good. But for open, progressive orgaizations, this can be very productive.]
4. Analytics/Big Data - Differentiation by Content/Information. [This is a logical progression. With content overload a well established issue, context-sensitive information packaged appropriately will definitely be well received by employees - especially senior executives.]

We'll share our perspectives in coming weeks and in the meantime would love to hear your predictions for 2011-2014.