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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
October 14, 2009

Table of Contents

Talkin’ ’bout a (B2B) Revolution
Platts unlocks its business information
E-mail can’t hide
A wiki wonderland
Google Labs Debuts Fast Flip
Wolfram Research Releases webMathematica 3
PolySpot and eZ Systems Team Up
Endeca and hybris Announce Strategic Reseller Agreement
Google, On Demand Books Sign Agreement
SirsiDynix Announces General Availability of Enterprise 3.0

Talkin’ ’bout a (B2B) Revolution

The convergence of communities, content, and communications across a variety of platforms and devices has given rise to a participatory culture in which each individual can co-create the content he or she consumes. The result is an avalanche of content available on websites, podcasts, videocasts, interactive forums, and blogs. The challenge is to develop the next generation of intelligence systems that will provide professionals-particularly forward-thinking executives that now see the web as a source of competitive intelligence and market feedback on their organizations and people-with time-sensitive analysis they need, when and how they need it.

However, it's not enough to extract relevant information and content from the daily deluge. We demand the content we need on our terms, aligned with our preferences, profiles, and (if we are on the move) real-time context. Prosumers, professionals, and executives require this and more. They need content tailored to their functions, work groups, and business tasks such as gathering competitive intelligence, managing risk, managing political events, and identifying and tracking the trends that matter.

Connect the dots, and there is a clear business imperative for content owners to move from mass production to mass customization. This, in turn, creates a new and huge requirement for intelligence systems that are proactive, real-time operational, and forward-looking that mash up with the content we create in every format from any source, including blogs, user communities, newspapers, newswires, magazines, trade journals, think tanks, corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions.

It is at this intersection that we find Llesiant, Inc., a provider of technology for tagging, organizing, filtering, and delivering intelligence for business and government. Llesiant's platform includes an automatic content indexing service; a taxonomy of business, law, and government; a patent-pending taxonomical search engine; and a custom publishing tool that supports multiple formats and syndicates more than 40,000 local information sources. It recognized a radical shift in B2B publishing and reacted with a suite of services to prepare companies for the coming revolution in publishing it calls "Business Intelligence 2.0."

As Lou Celi, Llesiant president and COO, is keen to point out, the internet revolution-which has been largely centered on the consumer market-has arrived full-force in the B2B community. "Until now," according to Celi, "most executives have relied on their favorite external business publications and destinations, fumbling through a barrage of information on the web." But this approach will quickly fall out of favor as executives face information overload. "Executives won't be able to search and use supermarket services like Lexis. Instead they will demand services that give them access to the information they need to make the decisions they must."

B2B companies will also have to do the same for their customers. Indeed, the most exciting observation that came out of my conversation with Celi, former SVP and publisher at The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd., was the emergence of a game-changing megatrend: The convergence of B2B marketing and publishing and the potential impact on B2B firms.

An obvious outcome is the pressure it puts on B2B companies to publish more and better content. But this information must go far beyond product descriptions, case studies, and white papers. It must grow to include podcasts, webcasts, blogs, and communities as a way for B2B firms to connect with their target audiences and reinforce their image as innovators.

Put another way, succeeding in the coming B2B information revolution is all about thought leadership or, more specifically, the capabilities to create and aggregate content that will allow a B2B company to be seen as a thought leader. The logic is as follows: If a company is seen as a thought leader, then the other marketing benefits will follow.

Llesiant is poised to make the most of this trend. It recently partnered with Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in an alliance to provide microsites and web-based on-demand intelligence. These miniwebsites on critical issues, industries, or functions are widely viewed to offer the most effective way for a B2B firm to communicate its position as a thought leader.

Executives require information that will give them the inside track on the latest ideas, innovations, and best practices. B2B companies-turned-publishers that generate nuggets of thought leadership (regardless of format) and deliver them tailored to the specific requirements of their customers will be the leaders-not the laggards-in the coming B2B information revolution.

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Platts unlocks its business information

Platts, a provider of energy information, is using Mark Logic’s technology as the foundation for LNG TraderNet, its interactive Web-based tool for managing analysis of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets. The service provides traders, analysts and other members of the LNG community with up-to-date news, pricing information, market fundamentals and more. MarkLogic Server helps Platts price, package and monetize its energy and metals information more effectively, according to Mark Logic.

Prior to the new system, Platts’ content was tied to different products and locked within collections of PDF files. With MarkLogic Server’s ability to load content as-is, Platts was able to unlock its business information and to eliminate the need to transform content, which was expensive and time-consuming.

Chris Sternberg, global director of product development at Platts, says, "As the LNG market continues to evolve, the solution has enabled us to surpass the limitations of traditional technologies and innovate in how we service our customers, delivering content in ways that were not possible before. LNG TraderNet is the only flexible online service to offer accurate LNG market data and provide customers with immediate access to the real-time and historic information energy traders rely upon to make important decisions, such as how to take inter-market effects into consideration in their own trading."

MarkLogic Server takes XML created as part of Platts’ newsletter production process and inserts metadata from a taxonomy to tag the textual content. That enables Platts to use the content that was previously locked in static PDFs and relate it to other contextual information, Mark Logic reports.

The solution also gives Platts custom publishing capabilities that allow users to extract parts of stories or an entire article for inclusion in an existing or newly created custom report. Platts also offers its customers new search and Web 2.0-style features that:

  • allow ranking search results by relevance and/or number of previous views,
  • relate search results to pricing assessments and other markets’ fundamental data,
  • enable the automatic creation of lists including the most frequently mentioned keywords,
  • permit users to save searches for future use and create RSS feeds from those searches, and
  • numerically rank the quality of stories and post comments.

Platts is the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill.

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E-mail can’t hide

Coveo has debuted its Enterprise E-mail Search package, which is said to be the first solution to provide unified access to all e-mail and attachments across the enterprise, whether offline in all employees’ desktop PST files, online, on live e-mail servers or in e-mail archiving platforms.

The company reports its Enterprise E-mail Search offering provides organizations with the cross-organizational ability to:

  • index, tag, categorize and securely access all enterprise e-mail content to reduce risk and conduct investigations;
  • provide completely unified access to e-mail and attachments regardless of where they are stored, offline within PST files on desktops or laptops, or online within active Exchange or e-mail archiving platforms;
  • access all unified e-mail sources via user desktop and Web interfaces or mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, including precise navigation within the content using intuitive facets;
  • retain and access institutional knowledge and goodwill when employees leave, enhancing customer relationships and increasing productivity; and
  • implement permission-based access to specific e-mail accounts, workgroup or enterprise e-mails tagged as public, reducing rework, increasing productivity and, particularly for consulting and other knowledge-based organizations, leveraging institutional knowledge to support customer engagements.

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A wiki wonderland

eTouch has introduced SamePage Version 4.2, which features a customizable dashboard, stronger e-mail integration and advanced plug-ins.

SamePage 4.2 includes a number of key features designed for remote knowledge workers, as well as business travelers and wiki administrators.

They include:

  • advanced e-mail integration that enables remote workers to more easily "wikify" content from any smartphone;
  • dynamic portal-like dashboard with drag-and-drop widgets that can be personalized at company and individual levels, eliminating the need for a separate intranet portal;
  • a wide selection of new plug-ins that can be customized for each enterprise, including tag cloud and project member plug-ins, among others;
  • more detailed analytics, usage and content reports for administrators;
  • ratings on blog posts and more blog analytics;
  • support for Microsoft Office 2007;
  • WYSIWYG enhancements to further simplify the user interface; and
  • increased privileges for the system user or administrator to manage pages and projects.

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Google Labs Debuts Fast Flip

Google Labs has announced the introduction of Google Fast Flip, a service that combines elements of print and online articles. Fast Flip lets users quickly browse through bundles of recent news and articles from a wide variety of websites, newspapers, and magazines, without having to experience the delays associated with visiting individual sites. The service also customizes what articles are displayed to fit user selections or the recommendations of others. The goal of the service is to provide a seamless, fast news reading system that duplicates the feel of a print magazine, letting users skip over unwanted items until something interesting is found.

Fast Flip was developed in collaboration with three dozen publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads, eliminating one common complaint from publishers about news aggregation services.

(fastflip.googlelabs.com)

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Wolfram Research Releases webMathematica 3

Wolfram Research has announced the availability of webMathematica 3, a new version of its technology for adding dynamic content like interactive calculations and visualizations to the Web. webMathematica 3 integrates the capabilities of both Mathematica 6 and 7 with web server technology. This new version of webMathematica features a number of improvements and additions, including the addition of a queueing system for computation jobs, improved expression language and custom tags, support for Wolfram Workbench, and a new logging system.

(www.wolfram.com)

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PolySpot and eZ Systems Team Up

Enterprise search developer PolySpot and open source content management developer eZ Systems have announced that they will collaborate to bring the PolySpot search interface functionality to the eZ Publish content management system. PolySpot's Enterprise Search technology allows users to search numerous types of resources both within and external to an enterprise.

(www.polyspot.com; www.ez.no)

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Endeca and hybris Announce Strategic Reseller Agreement

Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search applications company, and hybris, a vendor of multi-channel commerce and communication software, have announced a strategic reseller agreement that will enable Endeca to integrate the components of the hybris Suite into its own Endeca Commerce Suite. Endeca will sell and support the new offering, which will feature tight integration between the two suites. The joint offering aims to help customers find and buy the best products more easily, while providing merchandising to help eCommerce organizations promote and sell products more effectively.

(www.endeca.com; www.hybris.com)

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Google, On Demand Books Sign Agreement

Google has agreed to provide On Demand Books, LLC (ODB), with immediate access to over 2 million public-domain titles in the Google digital files. These titles will be added to the more than 1.6 million that are already available via ODB's Espresso Book Machine (EBM).

The Espresso Book Machine is a high-speed automated book-making machine. In a few minutes it can print, bind and trim a single-copy library-quality paperback book complete with a full-color paperback cover.

The Espresso Book Machine is powered by EspressNet, a software system that connects EBM to a vast network of permissioned content. Through encryption, EspressNet assures the security of publishers' titles, tracks jobs, and provides for payments to publishers. Content owners retain full ownership and control of their digital files.

(www.ondemandbooks.com; http://books.google.com)

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SirsiDynix Announces General Availability of Enterprise 3.0

SirsiDynix announced the release of SirsiDynix Enterprise 3.0, offering users a single search well for library catalogs, digital collections, web sites, and federated resources. Enterprise 3.0 aims to give libraries the ability to define profiles for specific local patron groups, as well as give library administrators the ability to configure search scope, look and feel, authentication requirements, and available content according to local needs.

(www.sirsidynix.com)

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