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.

WTD about TMI?

TMI - Too Much Information, Too Much Content, Too Much Data - are all here to stay with us. There will be more of everything that we will pull and more of everything that will be pushed to us.

On my BART ride last week (yes - very green of me), I read an interesting article (http://bit.ly/cHG21g) in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine on RIM CEOs failing to communicate their vision/strategy to the market. 99.9% of all the CEOs in the world will come out 2nd best when compared with Steve Jobs, but there was a particular comment made by Jim Balsille (RIM Co-CEO) that made me realize that RIM's market share and mind share in smartphones could erode faster than Motorola's or Nokia's:

Balsille thinks the world is wrong about apps. Many are just
glorified bookmarks, he argues, that aren't necessary if you can connect
customers to the Web.

Apple has 250,000 apps because most of them are serving a critical need of presenting content in a form that can be consumed very easily - especially on a mobile device. Yes - you can browse the web and search for whatever you need - but that does not help the TMI syndrome. If anything it exacerbates it. The apps are making it easy for iPhone, iPad or Android users to filter and consume the content available all over the Web. Even Google has embraced the app paradigm - even though "googling" for content is good for Google's ad revenues.

Gus Hunt, CTO for CIA, who is building a "peta" scale infrastructure to handle the data and computing requirements said at Cloud Expo last week that he wants any data to be used by any application. He does not want to invest in building applications that are dependent on a particular data set or a particular data set being created for a specific application. The days of consolidating all the data into a single repository are long gone and never coming back.

Question is What To Do about TMI?

First - Leverage technology that can reference data from any source in any format. It isn't feasible to try and standardize the legacy content repositories. Data will stay federated, so your content integration strategy should account for it as well. Speed and agility in accessing new content sources is a competitive advantage for today's businesses.

Second - Ensure that data cleansing can be automated. This will allow you to work with incomplete or partial data - especially when working with a large number of data sources.

Third - Focus on normalizing the aggregated data, so that the consuming applications can work independent of data sources. This will allow you to serve content to a variety of consuming applications and end devices - especially the constrained mobile devices that need additional filtering or formatting. This will also allow the content creators to focus on creating content and not to worry about the device/platform battles that are being waged on the other side of the value chain.

More to come on the innovation in these areas.....

A Cloud Apart: MuseGlobal, Content Integration and Cloud Computing

The SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco last week was a great event for MuseGlobal to strut our stuff amongst the major and up-and-coming players in the content and software industry. While there was some ballyhoo about this being a new convergence of industry players, it's no secret that software and content companies have been joined at the hips for many, many years.

There was a fair amount of that "everything old is new again" atmosphere at NetGain, including the touting of "cloud computing" from major service providers such as Google, Oracle and Salesforce.com. Well, of course all of these companies provide very powerful software and services, but the cloud was with us even well before the Web became a reality. As soon as there were servers and client computers on networks the network cloud was being exploited to deliver high-value content services to major enterprises and, eventually, consumers. From that long-term perspective, you could say that content has lived in the clouds for a long time.

The difference today is that with more and more content staying in the network cloud instead of being downloaded into desktop applications and enterprise servers making the cloud a universal source of information for specific purposes becomes all the more important. After-the-fact integration of other important sources in desktop applications or through enterprise databases becomes harder when you're basing all of your content resources in the network. This means that you need to get all of the right content in the right place at the right time inside of network content serving applications.

While managing transparent access to content sources can be hard for some technologies to manage, MuseGlobal content integration technologies make getting comprehensive and unified content from any range of content sources in network-based content services easier than ever. Yet again, MuseGlobal was there before the idea of transparent access to diverse content sources had become a fad. We've been sussing out the details of how to connect to thousands of different kinds of databases, search engines, feeds, subscription content services and Web mining applications on the widest range of networks for more than a decade. The architecture that we've put into place to manage this simply and reliably in a way makes MuseGlobal a content cloud unto itself - and given our track record with major publishers and content technology companies around the world, allow me to say that we see ourselves as a cloud apart from the rest.

The nice thing about MuseGlobal OEM technology is that you can decide for yourself how you want to work with our content cloud. You can take in content from MuseGlobal into the back end of your own content cloud, or you can use our integration software to create a content cloud that surrounds your own core content delivery technologies. Best of all, you can tune which sources you want to present from MuseGlobal and how you want to filter and present them very easily. Vertical search engines? We're there and all over it before you know it. Business intelligence engines? Been there, done that. Consumer ecommerce portals? Our cloud will be raining content on products that they'll be eager to buy.

So when you think of cloud computing, remember that you need to think about how much of the right content it will take for your own platform to be the rainmaker on the networks of your choice. Don't settle for a drizzle of the sources that your clients want - let MuseGlobal help you to make your content own cloud the one that pours it on.

Unifying Content in the Enterprise with Google, MuseGlobal and Adhere Solutions

MuseGlobal has been an OEM partner with many of today's leading enterprise search engines and search infrastructure providers through more than a decade of developing advanced technologies for content integration. Partnerships are at the core of our value in the content marketplace, after all, making it possible for companies to use our content integration technologies to make their own platforms shine. I must say, though, that our new partnership with Adhere Solutions to enable content integration for the Google Search Appliance is one of the more exciting opportunities that we're encountering in the enterprise marketplace.

Everyone knows Google, of course, including the millions of people in enterprises worldwide who use Google every day as one of their primary "go-to" resources for information found on the World Wide Web. For this reason sometimes Google is seen as "the enemy" in enterprise I.T. and knowledge management circles, the interface that keeps on getting attention as they try to engineer their own solutions from in-house and subscription content sources. In many of these institutions you can find the Google Search Appliance as a tool that departments or whole enterprises are using to unify external Web content with some internal content sources. It's a powerful concept, but one that needs every possible source included to gain everyone's attention - otherwise the GSA becomes just one of a number of searchable sources.

This is where the All Access Connector comes in. Using Adhere Solutions' extensive background in integrating the Google Search Appliance into enterprise environments MuseGlobal now has a partner that can help enterprise partners to leverage the full power of the MuseGlobal's content integration capabilities through the most popular search interface around. The All Access Connector enables over 5,400 different types of content sources to be integrated rapidly into the GSA. Subscription databases, internal databases and document repositories, Web content, feeds, content harvested from intranets and external sources, multiple search engines - all these and many more can be made available through one search interface and returned in whatever format accelerates your productivity the best.

The response to this product launch has been extraordinary. All of a sudden people who had not quite seen the potential for federated content are beginning to see the light now that the "G-word" has entered the picture. It's really quite a simple concept when you come right down to it: if people like using a particular tool to solve their problems, why not make that tool work better for them? Apparently this resonates loud and clear for many who have been frustrated with powerful solutions in enterprise markets that just don't seem to get used as much as they should. If Google is the platform that users want, and you can deliver content from all of your searchable sources and feeds through that platform, well, why not make all of your content available through it? With the All Access Connector, we're finally able to make "all" mean "all" - and in doing do we get people making the most of all of their investments in searchable content.

We're very excited by the response to the All Access Connector and we expect to be very busy this year helping people to make the most of it. It's a concept that MuseGlobal can make work through any platform, of course, not just Google - including your platform as well. Something to think about. In the meantime our thanks go out to to Erik Arnold and all of our new friends at Adhere Solutions who are making the All Access Connector a reality using our content integration technology. It's a great partnership that we expect will provide our customers with extraordinary returns on their investments in our joint capabilities.

Why are Search Engines Still Searching for Answers to Content Integration?

Recently I read an interesting article on Redmondmag.com, entitled "Searching for an Answer in the Enterprise." The article notes that enterprises are beginning to come up against the uncomfortable fact that today's enterprise search engines were never really meant to deal with all of the various types of content resources that the typical major enterprise uses to store information. While your typical search engine can be trained fairly well to traverse some of the more common data sources such as major databases and document servers there's a wealth of legacy systems, document management systems, content management systems and ERP systems that store much of the typical enterprise's internal wealth of content.

Unfortunately search engines aren't designed to deal with such a wide variety of content sources easily. Search engines are designed to look at accessible documents and to make an index of all of the information that's in them, so that someone can come along later and search that index. That's great - if you have access to all of the documents that you need to index on a regular basis. Unfortunately in many enterprises that's a very, very difficult thing to arrange. Many enterprise databases and other data repositories are enormous and are being updated constantly. To incorporate their contents in a separate search engine index would take enormous resources both for allowing the search engine to crawl such a database with some regularity and to update and store the search engine index - not to mention questions about security and data integrity that such a crawl might raise. In an era in which data leaks can mean huge legal and public relations issues solving search can be a lot easier than it sounds in slide presentations.

Federated search technology can help to overcome these limitations. Instead of trying to build one enormous index of every document that someone might need to search a federated search engine will take one search request and then formulate queries for each of the sources where there's content that might answer someone's question. Instead of relying on occasionally updated Web search indexes a federated search enables the index associated with each content source to be traversed separately. This means that as soon as each of those individual indexes is updated you're going to have access to the most current information. The results from each source are then combined to display the most relevant content available from all sources.

This certainly helps to solve the problem of getting the very precise results that the typical enterprise user expects - they don't want a pretty relevant report on last quarter's results, they want THE report on last quarter's results - but it's an approach that only works when you have access to every source of content that someone may need. If you don't then people will be disappointed and go off to use another way to find the information that they need. In other words, your investment in search technology will be ignored.

So to do federated searching the right way you need access to ALL of the possible content sources that someone may need to access. Yet this article points out:

In addition, Microsoft has moved to the forefront in the promotion of new federated search capabilities based on Creative Commons' OpenSearch standard. Several companies, including Open Text Corp., Business Objects, Cognos and EMC Corp., are developing federated search connectors to enable Microsoft's enterprise search customers to connect to their information systems.

Well, this is good news, I suppose, but why settle for "some" when you need all? This is of course where Muse comes in. We've been doing nothing but develop technology for federated content integration for more than ten years. Of course our thousands of pre-built source connectors can help you to do all of the federated searching that you need, but that's just where federated content integration starts. In addition to search engines, databases, ERP, ECM and the other alphabet soup acronyms that make up today's universe of enterprise content repositories Muse technology enables our partners to deliver content from the Web, from subscription content sources, from datafeeds and from web mining applications as well. Our partners get OEM software from Muse that enables them to equip any search service, Web application, email newsletter service or enterprise software application with all of the content that they need to deliver.

So our hats are off to all of those enterprise software solutions who are working hard to address some of the solution to federated content integration. You're doing great, but let us know when we can help you with a solution to all of your federated content integration needs. We're ready when you are!

Comprehensive Federated Search for Enterprises – Tomorrow from SAP and Oracle, Today From Muse

As we make the rounds with analysts and platform partners there’s more chatter than ever about federated content for enterprises. It’s not that federated search in enterprises is any thing new, of course – Muse has been doing it for ten years in thousands of enterprise installations around the world. But the position of federated search as an enterprise solution is beginning to shift. Years ago we started introducing federated search to enterprise libraries – the specialists in search for their organizations – to bring together collections from across an organization into a common electronic library interface. But as search engines became more popular in enterprises as the “go-to” starting points for finding content in a wider variety of enterprise repositories all of a sudden search engines began to trigger a turf battle with the major player in enterprise content integration.

It’s all about desktop and server room dominance: whose platform will be on top as the one into which everyone else’s content and services integrate? It used to be that vendors such as Oracle and SAP were the key content repository builders for enterprises through applications built around the capabilities of their platforms. While search engines from FAST/Microsoft, Autonomy, Google and others have gained a lot of popularity as one-stop shopping for search needs, there’s a comprehensive list of sources and interfaces that enterprises want to see integrated into search services.

It’s not just a matter of breadth of sources, either: many tricky issues such as database and network security, being able to assemble the most relevant content and being able to build a wide variety of outputs rapidly and cost-effectively all are major factors in getting a federated search environment working properly. There’s a long list of items that your customers will want checked off before they’ll take your solution seriously.

In theory this should play into the hands of platforms like SAP and Oracle – and in fact both have been moving to develop federated search applications for their current platforms. But when they say “yes” to being able to do federated search, just how broad is that answer? Does it include being able to manage security and access issues on the widest array of enterprise and Web databases possible? Does it mean being able to traverse any kind of network configuration to bring together and disseminate federated search results – including even the latest mobile platforms and legacy network protocols? Can they assemble not just raw search results from each source but also just the right content that makes sense in a given context?

These are hard questions for any content platform vendor to answer – unless they happen to be one that uses content integration solutions from MuseGlobal. With a decade of experience in developing successful solutions using federated search Muse has integrated more kinds of search engines, feeds and databases with more kinds of configurations for more kinds of content platforms than any one else. Muse federated search solutions are designed for optimal maintenance with a minimum of administration and hassle-free security and network management for the widest possible range of configurations.

Best of all, you can decide just how to integrate Muse’s capabilities around your platform – as a “back end” solution that can feed in the results of federated searches into your own platform or as a framework that can enable your platform to provide well-organized federated search results from both your own platform and other platforms combined into your own custom front-end solutions. Either way your clients will see it as your solution all the way – and keep you in the driver’s seat as your clients choose who is best at federating whom.

So whether you’re using Oracle, SAP, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint Server, Google, Vignette, EMC/Documentum or another content platform to provide federated search solutions there’s one partner that you can call on that’s been there, done that and got just about every t-shirt there is to wear in content integration. It your time to spend trying to come up with a winning solution for federated search – why not spend it signing up more customers who will keep you on top? We’re glad to help you do it, too.