I could write a long post on this topic, and perhaps will one day, but since time is of the essence in the blogosphere, I thought I'd do my "quick take" on my former employer's acquisition of Inxight, press release here. * I'd
Tim O'Reilly gave a fascinating, information-loaded, 105-slide keynote address this morning at the 2007 Mark Logic User Conference. Tidbits include: * O'Reilly's mission is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators: watch the alpha geeks. * Web 2.0, which could
This post’s title is one of my favorite sayings because it perfectly captures our conflicting attitudes toward change. Intellectually, people know that change is necessary for advancement, but emotionally, most of us still don’t like it. Happily, for companies like Mark Logic, there are always some brave souls
I think that most people now correctly perceive our product, MarkLogic Server, as an XML content server, a special-purpose DBMS designed specifically for handling XML marked-up content. That’s the good news. The better news is that many of these same people are figuring out what that means
I've always been a fan of Gartner's hype cycle, and have always loved Gartner's names for the milestones along the way (e.g., the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment). So it was fun to discover that Valleywag, the People Magazine of
Just a quick post to introduce readers to Scribd, a YouTube for documents. Let's explore that analogy. Before YouTube, videos were hard to share because they were too big to email and because there were various yucky formatting issues to resolve. YouTube solved this practical problem by letting
Things are sure crazy in enterprise search. * First, Verity forgets to invest in product innovation for several years, leaving themselves open to a general market-share assault and subsequent acquisition by Autonomy -- a company less than one-half Verity's size at the time they acquired them. That'
Two days ago, Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast Search and Transfer announced an agreement to purchase the Retrievalware business from Convera for $23M. You can find the press release here. Let's try to understand what this means. First, some background on Convera. Technically, Convera is a seven-year
On March 22nd, Netezza announced that it had filed a form S-1 with the SEC regarding a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock. You can find Netezza's registration document here. This is great news for Netezza, and I'd argue, for special-purpose
One of my memes is the rise of special-purpose database management systems (DBMSs). While I’m obviously a big believer in MarkLogic and XML content servers, I believe that XML content servers are simply one example of a whole new class of DBMSs, each designed and optimized for a
I recently found and greatly enjoyed this New Yorker article, entitled "Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information," by Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point and Blink fame). See here for my review of Blink. Open Secrets is a long (7,000 word) article
Just a quick post to a recent article on the costs associated with ineffective enterprise search. Tidbits include: * According to IDC, a company with 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5M in annual wasted salary costs because of poor search. * A recent survey of 1,000 middle managers
