Taking the Tech out of SemTech

Taking the Tech Out of SemTech
Sean Martin
President and CTO , Cambridge Semantics

Introduction
Cambridge Semantics Incorporated is a privately held company founded in 2007 and located in Boston
Most of the core technical team are former members of IBM’s Advanced Internet Technology Team
Cambridge Semantics directly licenses its Anzo Suite of software products to enterprise customers and also partners with third-party ISVs and consultancies to develop tailored and custom solutions developed on top of Anzo technology
Cambridge Semantics contributes to and supports Open Anzo, an open-source project from which much of the Anzo technology is drawn

Semantic Technology: The Potential
Bending the line requires a new paradigm, e.g.
1980’s - PC’s & Networks
1990’s - The Internet
2010’s – Semantic Technology
No Go
No One Cares
Yesterday’s Game Changeis Today’s Basic IT
Innovators Get the Advantage
Revenue Growth
Margin Improvement
Risk Reduction
New Business Models
Cost (to build or buy)
Game
Change
Basic IT
Bare Minimum
Wish for
Useable Information

State of the Union
A broad, long-term vision unfolding since 1998
Many of the underpinnings—semantic technology standards—are in place
Significant advancements in hardware
More and more emerging applications that use semantic technologies…
…but what’s practical for semantic technologies to do in an enterprise today?

“Technology”
From a business leader’s perspective, how is “technology” viewed?
As an “enabler”

What are business leaders worried about?
6
Increasing shareholder value
Which typically translates into
Driving revenue
Managing costs
Optimizing market perception
More concerned with getting the job done than with technical uniqueness or elegance
That said, there are seniors managers with a passion for new technology….however

Customers and the Chasm
*
Chasm
Visionaries
Pragmatists
Chasm between early-stage and late-stage
Point of greatest peril lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of pragmatic customers
Occurs when a hot technology product cannot be readily translated into a major new benefit
* Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore

Crossing the Chasm
Forrester and Gartner forecasted several years ago that 2008 would be the inflection point for semantic technology to begin moving into the mainstream
“Standards development and maturation of technologies will reach a “sweet spot” in 2008, after which growth of semantics-based business-to-business will accelerate” Gartner Group 2007
In 2008 one could almost see the tide turn with growing interest in semantic technology from a few of the major players
This accelerated in 2009 with the attendance at the 2009 SemTech conference in San Jose by the likes of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Google – and the momentum continues to build in 2010

Why Semantic Technologies?
Semantic technologies allow us to build applications that…
... promote shareable and reusable data based on open standards
... are resilient to change
... from above (managerial, regulatory)‏
... from inside (our understanding of a domain)‏
... from outside (e.g., new public information, new business partners, M&A)‏
... can better navigate and find links across data silos
... support far more automated reasoning

Looking Forward
Concept of an Information Fabric will evolve to one of a “Semantic Fabric”
Overlay an enterprise’s information assets
Needed to reap the benefits of Semantic Technology
Greatly accelerate the convergence of the enablers of collaboration
Semantic Technology will increasingly move technology into the background
Users will be able to do more without calling in IT
Fundamentally change the way IT and software are viewed within an enterprise

ROI before URI

Provide business users with intuitive interfaces they are already using every day
Hide the technology but expose the benefits
Business can now do things never possible before
Remove a layer of IT overhead between business and data
Allowing many former IT projects to become business projects
Much faster, cheaper and easier
Integrate siloed or inaccessible data (e.g., spreadsheets, etc.) and make that data more useful to the business
Our Vision
Leverage the “game changing” technology shift semantic computing represents to bring business closer to information

Getting There From Here
Cambridge Semantics is focused on providing practical solutions to address customer needs
This was the rationale around selecting spreadsheets as one of our initial Anzo offerings
Our customer efforts are centered on identifying specific use cases that showcase the capabilities of Anzo to provide real value
We feel this will be the way semantic technology increasingly moves into the mainstream
Incrementally, through proven successes
Driven as much by the business side as by IT

Practical Demonstrable Wins
“2000 hours reduced to 50 hours for development”
“Estimated 4,000 employee hours could be saved per year in the demonstrated use cases”
“Support costs reduced - from 320 hours/month reduced to 30 minutes/month”
“Project completed in 2 weeks and deployed in less than a month”
“Eliminates error-prone nature of manually filling in an upload assistant template”
“Reduces assay-registration cycle time from 3 days to a few hours and enables full self-service process (0-day cycle time) for registering common protocols”
“Copying information from a registration form takes 1-2 hours; Anzo solution requires only a few minutes to review”
“Development time reduced from months to weeks”
“Quicker turnaround time  quicker ability to upload assay results  quicker ability to analyze results and proceed with the project”

Viral Expansion
“With Anzo Server and Anzo for Excel, individuals can easily leverage tools that they are familiar with to achieve effective collaboration, self-service capabilities, and seamless integration with legacy databases”
“Strategically, this technology could serve as a platform to develop new semantically enabled applications and also function as a semantic bridge which provides interoperability and extensibility for legacy systems”
“Qualitative benefits could be even greater especially in the context of research collaboration”
“New opportunities made possible
New product offerings becoming practical, driven by reduced costs
New service offerings because “there is just no other way to do this today!”

Corporate Integration
Appendix

Disruptive Technology Meets the Chasm
Clayton Christensen summarized adoption by the mainstream as follows:
“Despite the signiﬁcant academic research and evidence from the ﬁeld supporting the power of disruptive innovation, many of the principles required to manage disruptive innovation successfully may still appear counterintuitive at best, and threatening at worst, to managers in established companies. Having a number of demonstration projects can show skeptics the power of following a different approach. Some companies have done the best job of succeeding with disruption have started with one or a handful of clear success stories before seeking to expand their efforts.”
This has also been Cambridge Semantics’ experience to date
We have found that once real value is demonstrated there is “pull” within an enterprise to expand into other areas

Potential Merger Integration Needs
Post Merger Issues in Pharma Companies
Parallel processes & systems
Valuable historical data/ information in each systems
Deep understanding of the processes and systems as to what does and does not work
Integration with partners and third parties will need to be re-established if/when systems are decommissioned or changed
Quality, compliance and regulatory requirements need to be supported by new systems
Need to consolidate:
Processes and systems so themerged company can function as one company

Semantic Technology’s Advantage Over Traditional System Integration Approaches
Traditional approach to system integration:
Build & deploy a data warehouse
Deploy a BI report package
Author new canned queries
As new needs from the old data are identified
More data warehouse are built and deployed
…the cycle continues
Semantic data integration is an incremental, use-as-needed approach that builds on itself to address the full enterprise need
An initial use case built and deployed: Data managed by messaging bus in a Service Oriented Architecture so integration is easier
Users can create their own visualization tools or reports as these tools are easy to execute
Users can query on their own and no canned queries need to be developed
As new needs from the old data are identified
New databases can be plugged into the existing Semantic Fabric and this data can immediately be available to all users
As new visualization tools are created, they become available to all users

Semantic Integration Advantages
Anzo Platform creates a “Semantic Fabric”
Semantic Technology allows meaning to travel with data resulting in unambiguous identity, flexible relationships, discoverable context, and automated reasoning
Integration is achieved because data/services have embedded meaning
Semantic Fabric is an overlay with connectors to both data sources and applications
User self-service based on
Ability to pull and/or push data into databases & services
Data /queries in format users can understand
Real-time manipulation of data structures
Cost effective and rapid implementations
Design flexibility due to ability to repurpose data

Key Advantage of Anzo is Flexibility
Scope of Anzo utilization
Specific focused integrations or backbone for overall integration of all systems
As a temporary bridge or a permanent solution - or evolving over time from one to the other
Add features and/or capabilities as needed – continuous improvement more than life-cycle management
Semantic fabric is “agnostic” relative to linked data source, application, service, etc.
Much faster implementations compared to traditional approaches
Allows possibility of evaluating multiple initial POCs
Much less IT burden – company personnel easily trained to maintain, modify, support system
Enables creation of “situational applications” (within quality and regulatory constraints)
Integration with outside vendors, partners, and third parties straightforward
By creating a Semantic Fabric, Anzo opens the door future benefits of semantic technology

Additional Benefit from the Semantic Approach
CSI approach allows for rapid integration of “shadow IT” data stored in spreadsheets with data from System A and System B integrated in the fabric
Data integrated in the fabric can easily be pushed or published onto a web interface
Data in either system can be searched semantically (i.e., based on context)
Views can be created on-the-fly by users
Users can discover data that they never knew was in the system
New push /pull applications can easily be created and published on the web or on a mobile device
Data entered in these applications can be integrated to data from System A and System B
Solution provides version control, provenance, security at a data element level,… so that if mistakes are made, the error can be quickly corrected

Removing the Tech…
DEMO
(Please contact sean@cambridgesemantics.com for questions and to arrange a demo.)

Taking the Tech out of SemTech

by LeeFeigenbaum on Jul 01, 2010

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Taking the Tech out of SemTech — Presentation Transcript