Enterprise Search: Software installation is only the beginning – Ranking and Relevancy

One of the most common misconceptions I hear almost on a weekly basis is that search is just a install and go piece of software. The simple fact is this just isn’t the case if you want to maximize you return on investment and improve your content’s findability, configuration is essential. At it’s highest level the success of a search engine is it’s ability to return relevant results and ranked in a reasonable order. To do this a search expert typically will create what is known as a ranking and relevancy model. If your site or application has any degree of personalization/user types, multiple models may be required. (Some search engines attempt to do this automatically with varying degrees of success). So I’ve got the ranking and relevancy model defined, I can leave it now right? Alas No. As you add new content sources to the search engine or the content changes, as should the model. So the model should be regularly maint ained. I’d recommend the following: First month since go live (Weekly updates) First 3 months since go live (Every 30 days) First year, at least review the model every 90 days And update the model(s) if any new content source is added Sometimes the process of maintaining the model is an hour of work, other times it could be in the 8-16 hours range, it really depends on how much the content has changed since you last updated it. So what’s the value of this and why should your company spend the money in maintaining the ranking and relevancy model? Put simply it’s the difference between good search results and bad ones and from a business point of view it all ends up as  return on investment. If you don’t update the model regularly, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars you invested will not generate a significant return. You users will complain about search, IT will look bad for a “failed” p roject and the board will wonder what the money was spent on. To give you an example I hear from a new potential client who says “We have vendor a, but it doesn’t work after we spend $xxxxxxx of dollars, so now we want vendor b”. To which I always reply when was the last time the search engine was looked at and the ranking and relevancy refined. The answer I always get is “not since we installed it x years ago”. So trust me, maintain your search engine, you won’t regret it.

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Driving Enterprise R&D: the SAP and Intel Collaboratory

I was in Northern Ireland today to announce the opening of a new joint laboratory with SAP focused on Cloud Computing and Sustainable IT. The SAP and Intel Collaboratory, as it’s called, will be located at SAP’s research center at the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.

The Collaboratory builds upon a history of very successful collaborations between the two companies, including the Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in Palo Alto, California, the LinuxLab in Walldorf, Germany, and the Innovation Value Institute at the National University of Ireland. Intel and SAP are also partners on various European Framework 7 projects. The Collaboratory represents the natural progression of the research relationship between SAP and Intel. Its charter is to understand and drive enterprise computing in Europe such as Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. Using cloud-based services, businesses are beginning to “rent” IT, shifting capital expenditures on hardware to scalable, “pay-as-you-go” services. The implications of this shift touch almost every aspect of our products from the silicon microarchitecture through the software/solution stacks. The work at the Collaboratory will complement our internal research efforts in Cloud and Data Rich Computing, such as the Open Cirrus test bed.

Cloud computing is also driving up the size of datacenters which is leading to increased focus on energy efficiency and greater interest in sustainable IT. Beyond simply reducing the energy consumption of computing, sustainable IT applies the latest information and communication technologies to more efficiently manage the power grid, water supplies, and other large-scale resource management systems. The Collaboratory will be studying both: green “for” IT, and green “by” IT.

Additionally, through the Collaboratory we will work with academic institutions such as Queens University & University of Ulster to help develop more relevant research projects in these areas. I expect that as we build a network of industrial and academic research partners around the Collaboratory, it will emerge a leader in enterprise thinking in Europe.

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Your future data center – is it bigger than a breadbox?

These are dog years for servers.   Pretty much every year Intel introduces a new Xeon processor.  Those who have heard the story recognize this as the Tic Tock model.  On Tic years the manufacturing process is updated, on Tock years the chip architecture is updated.  Every year customers get a boost in performance, and often a cut in power.  Typically this boost is in the 50% neighborhood, enough to make it worth the upgrade, and still achievable by engineering teams on a two year cycle.  Except, we are in dog years.

The Nehalem During this same five years we have seen virtualization technology go from a lab project AND servers are 10X faster.ot only can you virtualize the ERP, you are irresponsibly wasting resources if you do not.If this advancement wasnThenew biggest leap ever.It isn.breadbox

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