No connectors, no Enterprise Search

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Anaïs LERMA | No Comments

The Apprapids blog reveils that many companies are willing to migrate from proprietary search solutions to Open source Lucene/Solr ones. But the author suggests a misunderstanding about the abilities of the solution in itself: “It is interesting that any company would choose Solr as their search platform since they do not have any connectors. How can they be considered enterprise search?”

Another article states that connectors can be a critical attributes for Enterprise Search projects : “We have seen many enterprise search systems built on solr that are inoperable due to their lack of connectors.”

We think that a company has to interface every single sources of data they use when integrating a Search Infrastructure. It is a pity to break half of the silos of the enterprise. We clearly understand that a request could then remain unsuccessful as not all the drawers have been rummaged through.

If Solr had great updates in 2011 as the Near Real-Time (NRT) search functionality, We agree with the authors of Apprapids: “Our main complaint is that Solr claims to be enterprise search without providing any connectors”, said Megal Feil.

PolySpot maintains its own connectors to interface its solutions (ECM, CRM, File Systems, Databases, Social media, Emails servers…)

An Enterprise Search Infrastructure, a cost-effective way to capitalize on existing applications.
For multiple reasons, many specialist applications cannot be accessed by all potential users. This can be due to license cost issues, obsolete systems, migration costs and applications that are excessively technical or difficult to use.
As Megan Feil suggests “it is best to circumvent this lack of access by utilizing a search engine. Users can tap into the data locked inside these closed applications.”

Expertise Finding: Unlock the Knowledge within Your Company

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Anaïs LERMA | No Comments

In an organization, an answer may not be in a document. A colleague with particular subject matter expertise may be the resource an employee needs to solve a business problem. Traditional search systems are blind to these high-value knowledge sources.

- Who is working on a particular topic?

- Who knows about…?

- Who can help me to use this application?

- Who wrote this document?

Until today, to find experts in a field, some human resource experts have begun to create database on which each employee should declare their potential expertise(s). Unfortunately there is little chance that the database is updated.

An Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure knits together fragments of information so a system user can locate an individual in the organization with the information required to answer a particular business or technical question. The key is the content enrichment capabilities provided by an Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure. Using semantic and other advanced techniques, the Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure figures out from job titles, reports, business unit and emails who is a specialist in particular fields. Without requiring employees update, their expertise is always up-to-date. (…) Read more

How Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure Can Help CIOs? The value of agility

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Anaïs LERMA | No Comments

“In the world of IT, the term agile means the ability to respond quickly with all information easily accesible and enriched to enable business executives to make effective decisions,” notes Arnold IT.

Our society is facing a data and content overload. Raw data are on the rise, and just as search is used for personal needs, the search feature is essential in business and its everyday applications. The digital information required by some organizations can be overwhelming, and organizations need a solution to help cope with the excess of data.

 “The flood of data is reaching new highs daily and the technology revolution is upon us. In order to keep up, businesses need to utilize tools to help them adapt,” says Jennifer Shockley.

On the top of this, data and content are disseminated and contained in various silos. The approach disables and impairs delivery of timely, comprehensive and relevant information which is needed by business workers.

Developing and succeeding with the implementation an effective information strategy for an organization can be challenging. A flawed search system erodes employee and business productivity. A loss of compliance with regulatory guidelines increases operational risk. A flowed search implementation boosts infrastructure management costs.

Enterprise search is the backbone of an information-centric organization. An Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure or ASI can help businesses sort through the confusion from an endless and steadily rising influx of data and content, transforming information chaos into an information asset.

“The more easily accessible information is to the company, the more realistic the expectation of maintaining a functional and productive system. Agility stems from access and findability. BI solutions will excel when proper search infrastructure is in place”, states Arnold IT team.

Search is not a new marketing buzz word. The search feature exists within any business applications but remains specialized and specific to each silo. Employees have to learn to use different search systems due to the non-standardized search systems for each silo. The cost of an ineffective search architecture consumes time at a prodigious rate.

Arnold IT teams notes the necessity, beyond agility whithin a team, to get “solutions that also incorporate mobility and a focus on the user experience, in order to maintain the flexibility and vigiliance required of agility, business professionals need”.

Download the white paper How Agile Enterprise Search Infrastructure Can Help CIOs to learn how Implementing advanced enterprise search applications yields significant and helps solve major technical and business issues

Vivisimo drown in Big Blue

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Olivier MICHEL | No Comments

After the acquisition of Fast by Microsoft, Autonomy by HP, Endeca by Oracle and Exalbead by Dassault Systemes, Vivisimo has signed yesterday a definitive agreement to be acquired by IBM.

In its press release, IBM said it is buying Vivisimo for accelerate its “big data analytics initiatives with advanced federated capabilities allowing organizations to access, navigate, and analyze the full variety, velocity and volume of structured and unstructured data without having to move it.”

Stephen E. Arnold, analyst and Search specialist, seems skeptical about Vivisimo analytical capabilities.

“Big data. Wow. That’s an angle only a public relations person with a degree in 20th century American literature could craft. Vivisimo is many things, but a big data system? News to me for sure. [...] However, I do not get the “big data” angle.”

As Arnold IT points out : “IBM will soon have a new big data platform to show for this acquisition. Their current big data platform is based on open source Apache Hadoop and they hope to expand this one to run on other distributions such as Cloudera.”

Twitter thanks the open source projects and sponsors the Apache Software Foundation

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Olivier MICHEL | No Comments

Chris Aniszczy, Open Source Manager at Twitter announced last Thursday that Twitter has become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, a non-profitorganization founded in 1999 to support the community of developers of Apache server,and has since supported many projects including an incubator for start-ups of open source projects.

Starting today, we are sponsoring The Apache Foundation. We look forward to contributing more and increasing our commitment to @TheASF

— Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) Avril 19, 2012

As a matter of fact, Twitter is an avid user and contributor to many Apache projects like Mesos, the database Cassandra, Hadoop, Mahout, Pig and Lucene.

“The ASF (the Apache Software Foundation) provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects that Twitter consumes and contributes to”, said Chris Aniszczy.

This sponsorship is the logical next step for the microblogging platform that has demonstrated its interest and commitment to open source projects releasing the project Cassie (Cassandra client) and Scalding (a MapReduce framework) to open source.

“Sponsoring the ASF is not only the right thing to do, it will help us sustain our existing projects at the ASF by supporting the foundation’s infrastructure”, stated Chris Aniszczy.

Its large open source contributions also count Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores, FlockDB, graphical database for creating social graph used in  the function of  ”who to follow”.

« As Twitter grows, we look to further our commitment to the success of the ASF and other open source organizations », conclut Chris Aniszczy (@cra)