ALMI story ,,
Corporate Information.....
AlphaCONNECT, a division of Alpha Microsystems, is pioneering new ways to leverage knowledge management with the vast array of information available on the Web as well as existing client server and legacy-based systems. We have created sophisticated technologies that provide enterprises with powerful, simple-to-use tools for transforming the data from disparate resources into actionable information. As a result, knowledge workers can quickly access the actionable information they need, when they need it, and present it in any format they desire.
AlphaCONNECT technologies automatically convert data from many sources into useful and organized information, then format it for use with popular desktop applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, database managers, contact management software, and Web browsers.
A key innovation in the AlphaCONNECT technology is reverse data warehousing. Data warehousing is a well-established information technology for working with existing enterprise-wide information. AlphaCONNECT's innovative reverse data warehousing enables enterprises to download data from a variety of Internet and other external sources, including enterprise legacy systems, then integrate it with their proprietary data resources to produce powerful knowledge bases for decision-making.
AlphaCONNECT, recognizing the unique nature of working with HTML documents, was able to develop this reverse data warehousing technique named AC Spotlight. It is one of the three modules included in the AC Knowledge Management Suite.
RECENT NEWS ARTICLES:
MICROSOFT FIRST CUSTOMER TO SELECT ALPHA MICROSYSTEMS' AC SPOTLIGHT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY
Company submits provisional patent application and schedules showcase for AC Spotlight in Microsoft's Partner Pavilion at Comdex Enterprise Show
SANTA ANA, CALIF., SEPTEMBER 2, 1998 ... Alpha Microsystems (NasdaqNM: ALMI), today announced that its AlphaCONNECT® Information Technology division has delivered, after months of collaborative beta testing, the Company's knowledge management software to Microsoft Corporation (NasdaqNM:MSFT) to expand the functionality of Microsoft's executive management intranet. The Alpha Micro End User License provides Microsoft with a customized version of AlphaCONNECT's highly scalable AC Spotlight software. This product delivery coincides with both Alpha Microsystems' commercial release of the innovative software and the submission of a provisional patent application for the underlying technology. Pricing for the AC Spotlight knowledge management software will range from initial set-up costs of $10,000 to $100,000+, based upon size, complexity and specific requirements of the enterprise, in addition to corresponding annual support and consulting fees.
"We are excited that our technology has placed us in the forefront of this burgeoning market," commented Alpha Microsystems chairman and CEO Douglas J. Tullio. "Having Microsoft as our first customer should enhance our position as a technology innovator and provide us with a higher level of recognition as a significant player in the knowledge management marketplace." Tullio continued, "We have not found many companies who currently provide equivalent technology and those that have emerged as possible competitors, such as Junglee and C2B Technologies, have been quickly acquired by larger companies such as Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN) and Inktomi (Nasdaq:INKT).
"AlphaCONNECT is in the business of data management," said vice president of marketing Denny Michael. "When Microsoft expressed its need for a technology that could retrieve unstructured data from the Internet and move it into a structured database, we were confident that we could provide a successful solution."
Michael continued, "Not only did we deliver a product meeting Microsoft's specifications, but we created additional technologies and scalable consulting services that can be customized to meet the needs of virtually any company in any industry. We believe this technology provides access to unique actionable information needed by industry to stay competitive in today's fast moving environment".
As part of AlphaCONNECT Knowledge Management Suite of software solutions and consulting services for the enterprise, AC Spotlight employs technologies designed to help companies make informed business decisions by efficiently harvesting, organizing, analyzing and sharing various types of data, such as business intelligence, news, industry trends, mortgage rates and financial and economic information. Specifically, AC Spotlight allows for "reverse data warehousing" - a process of collecting unstructured data from the Web and transforming it into a structured form for storage in ODBC-compliant databases.
AC Spotlight was developed by AlphaCONNECT and then customized based on Microsoft's requirements. It has undergone several months of intensive beta testing where it received extensive feedback from Microsoft personnel. Alpha Microsystems will be showcasing the technology suite inside the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at next week's Comdex Enterprise Show in San Francisco, September 8th to the 10th. The AlphaCONNECT booth will be located at space MS-17.
Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The Company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use.
MICROSOFT APPROVES ALPHA MICROSYSTEMS SPOTLIGHT FOR INCLUSION IN MICROSOFT ALLIANCE PROGRAM
Alliance Program Provides Potential of Over 15,000 Resellers
SANTA ANA, CALIF., SEPTEMBER 9, 1998 ... AlphaCONNECT®, a division of Alpha Microsystems (NasdaqNM:ALMI), today announced that it has been approved by Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT) to participate in the Microsoft Certified Solution Provider (MCSP) Alliance Program where AlphaCONNECT will feature its recently announced AC Spotlight knowledge management technology. The Microsoft Alliance Program provides AlphaCONNECT the opportunity to reach more than 15,000 reselling solution providers, worldwide, with its AC Spotlight product. The program features the industry's leading hardware, software and service companies as members of this alliance.
Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing for Alpha Microsystems, commented, "We consider the MSCP Alliance Program an excellent opportunity to leverage our innovative AC Spotlight technology to potentially thousands of qualified reselling companies. Based upon our agreement, we will provide all eligible partners a free, not-for-resale evaluation version and a special discount for all partners who become resellers of AC Spotlight. In addition, we envision using this channel for future knowledge management products such as our recently announced AC Enterprise and AC Convert & Apply.
A recent study by International Data Corporation (IDC), indicated that 87 percent of companies participating in the MSCP Alliance Program reported average annual revenue gains of 41 percent over the past three years," said Michael. "Of those companies, 95 percent stated that the Microsoft affiliation contributed significantly and, on average, was responsible for 29 percent of their growth increase. Michael continued, "The IDC study further stated that more than 80 percent of those in the study agreed that their participation in the program made their business more profitable and that one third reported improved margins."
Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use.
AlphaCONNECT®, a division of Santa Ana, California-based Alpha Microsystems, offers powerful foundation technologies for business intelligence software serving the Internet, intranet, corporate-information technology and software development markets. Both the Company and its independent vendor partners use AlphaCONNECT® to provide award-winning business-to-business and consumer-based products. For more information, visit the Company's Web site at www.alphaconnect.com.
October 5, 1998
Portal power
Corporate portals will open up your intranet
By Benjamin Keyser
Companies burdened with bulging intranets and no tangible return on investment on those reams of information, take heart. The convergence of souped-up search engines, new indexing techniques, and Web standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) promise to bring order to the chaos in the form of corporate portal sites.
Like a private Yahoo behind the firewall, corporate portals will someday provide intelligent browsing as well as raw searching. And the best part is that competition is burgeoning among players who want to provide end-to-end extranet solutions: no in-house gurus required. Netscape was the latest to take part in signing a partnership with Intraware to transition Netscape's Netcenter to the corporate-aimed IT Knowledge Center.
But will more technology help knowledge workers hit the bull's eye?
Search technology has been around for more than 25 years so it's tried and true. But frustrated users know that entering keywords to get information off an intranet can be like trying to peel an onion with a sledgehammer. On the other hand, categorizing and tagging information by hand mires knowledge workers, who already can't stay afloat in data storm surge, in minutia. Mark Swenson, senior Web technologist at Boeing in Seattle, knows this rock-and-a-hard-place challenge intimately.
Swenson is charged with making the more than 1,000 Web sites on Boeing's intranet containing more than 1.5 million pages of information accessible to 160,000 users. In addition to providing a search engine (Boeing uses InfoSeek), Swenson's team devised 34 subject categories to tag sites so users can browse. Swenson's experience has convinced him that combining search with category browsing in a corporate portal is key to making his intranet productive, but he's still seeking a technology that automates the process effectively.
Boeing tried having authors categorize their own pages, but inconsistency created "a mess," so they dropped the idea and went with a full-time librarian who "can't keep up with the volume," Swenson says.
Yahoo does it the old-fashioned way, employing more than 50 librarians to maintain their intelligent category hierarchy, but most organizations can't or don't want to use precious manpower, says Hadley Reynolds, director of research at The Delphi Group. Reynolds points out that often the volume of existing untagged documents is too great for organizations to face. "You won't find CIOs spending money on library staff to categorize documents on the company intranet ... [they are] going to demand automated tools."
Enterprise portals
Alpha Microsystems, in Santa Ana, Calif., says the corporate portal is the best model. Makers of a product suite called Connect, launched early last month, Alpha leverages existing documents and databases in their original location and format, transforming and delivering them to a centralized, managed portal site. Alpha will even outsource the portal management for corporate customers.
Information on the portal, however, is mainly determined up front by the publisher of the information or an administrator familiar with the content. While this approach will provide significant value for companies as they go forward in constructing a portal, it doesn't relieve the pressure of accumulated documents that belong on the portal but are not yet well enough organized to be posted there.
Alpha bundles a search engine that includes technology to sort documents by matching against predefined search criteria, but like Verity's Topic Server, it's really a filtering mechanism rather than a true categorization engine. And like all types of souped-up searching, the intelligence needed to divine linguistic relationships to produce meaningful, accurate browsing categories is missing.
Meanwhile, Inso is entering the fray by helping companies transform document stores into XML so they can be published on portals and deliver rich search and organizational capabilities. By looking for clues within original documents to determine underlying structure, Inso's DynaBase server marks up documents in a way that is similar to how databases put information into columns. This added meta-information can then be used to provide context for searching on keywords. For example, a technician might want to see all occurrences of a given product found only within special warning sections in first-time installation guides.
The drawback to this approach, however, is that the input documents must have enough structure for DynaBase to recognize and re-code them effectively as XML. Many companies facing piles of faxes, e-mail, HTML, and other office documents don't have this head start.
"Search is dead"
Claude Vogel, CEO of Semio, in San Mateo, Calif., hopes he can help solve this problem with a new type of text-mining technology. Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy, in San Francisco, is betting his company's future on similar ideas, proclaiming that, "search is dead." These companies, and a slew of others (Aptex, Sovereign Hill, Fulcrum, and even behemoths IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft) are pursuing advanced subject classification technologies that employ sophisticated statistical analytical methods to analyze and clump documents into meaningful categories by analyzing their underlying linguistic relationships.
Based on a branch of mathematics called Bayesian statistics, this method uses statistical probabilities to determine relationships between words, explains professor Hal Varian, dean of the school of information management (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley. For example, if the phrase "nuclear arms" appears often near the phrase "mutually assured destruction" or "war," a relationship emerges that produces a meaning about weaponry, and not about artificially powered limbs.
A series of these relationships, when put together and boiled down, form a subject classification hierarchy. The more documents in the repository, Varian says, the greater the chances that meaningful relationships will be identified by the software. In a sense, systems will "learn" more as information is added. The result of the process is clusters of subject-related documents and meaningful categories.
Semio's product represents these clusters in an interactive spider-web map that can be displayed in a browser like an interactive table of contents to the intranet. Meanwhile, technology from rival categorization engine company Autonomy doesn't visualize subject relationships, but instead automatically creates hypertext links within documents so that users can drill down on topics as they research. Microsoft is employing similar methods to create improved help applications and has an entire research group dedicated to the pursuit of perfecting this technology.
Intelligent grouping
But are these category engines ready for a prime spot on the portal?
Although not yet in production, the next version of Fulcrum's Knowledge Network will include similar analytical technology. The prototype is already in use at the European Space Agency and is in tests at the European Patent Office (EPO) under the guidance of Nicholas Walker at Fulcrum, who has been involved in the project for more than four years. In the EPO test, scientific reports are grouped by subject so that patent officers can easily cross-reference them against new patent applications, a task that would be impossible without the technology.
Walker cautions that the technology works best when the documents are at least loosely related and contain a good measure of quality, focused content, as in the EPO experiment. Another issue is performance and scalability. Fulcrum's subject classification engine can only handle about 100,000 documents at a time before the classification engine stops scaling well on a typical NT server, Walker said. In order to fully render subject categories in a multilevel hierarchy against the maximum number of documents, the process may take as many as 48 hours.
Despite these performance pitfalls, Hadley Reynolds, director of research at the Delphi Group, thinks these products will someday prove to be linchpins in corporate portals. He cites a Delphi study showing that $148 million was spent last year on Knowledge Management -- $94 million in software licenses alone.
"We expect to see it grow close to 100 percent per year for the next three years ... and search tools will be a key software category in this new market," Reynolds says.
Are corporate portals ready for deployment? The answer is yes, but experts say that they won't provide all the benefits of a Yahoo until corporations are willing to hire librarians to do categorization work or until category engines are perfected.
The best and most effective implementations of corporate portals will be similar to that of enterprise resource planning, in which the consultation and total solution package is far more important than any individual technology. Corporate portals may well be the model for how these technologies can converge, however, and with standards such as XML exploding, the opportunity to tie the pieces together is more real than ever.
But don't look for easy solutions.
"Technology will help," says Mark Swenson, "but it won't do the whole job."
BusinessVue 2.0 Finds Web Information for You
by Lisa Moskowitz, PC World
March 16, 1998
The Internet is like an enormous library at the mercy of an out-of-date card catalogue: Sometimes you just can't find what you're looking for no matter how many search engines or directories you query. It's not that these tools are entirely inadequate, it's just that there's so much information available that it's hard to keep track of. When you do find what you want, how can you put the information to use?
Enter Alpha Microsystems. Its AlphaConnect software division has developed BusinessVue, software that pulls information from multiple Web sites and pushes it to users via fax, pager, e-mail, or the Web itself. It also allows you to seamlessly transfer Internet information into neatly formatted Excel or Word documents. AlphaConnect showed BusinessVue 2.0 last week at Internet World 98.
Currently in beta, BusinessVue 2.0 is a free download that provides information on user-specified companies. You enter a company name for a brief profile (address, contact number, CEO name). Through partnerships with Market Guide, Business Wire, Reuters, and Investor Business Daily, BusinessVue provides company news. Edgar Online provides SEC filings, and DR-LINK scans a database of more than 4000 news sources for the latest happenings as well as archived materials. PC Quote furnishes stock quotes for your chosen company, and Zack's Investment Research has analyst recommendations. You can also check out chat sessions on DejaNews to find out what other people are saying about the business world. The information appears in a window under each tab.
Once you have the information you want, you can do a variety of things with it. Click the Excel or Word button and BusinessVue automatically transfers the data to these programs and formats it accordingly. You can also e-mail, page, or fax it to a friend with one click. To keep up with news while you're away from your PC, you can set your preferences to have BusinessVue alert you by pager, e-mail, or fax. When you're working on your system, BusinessVue will alert you on screen, with sound, or by e-mail.
As information grows on the Internet, technology like that from AlphaConnect will become more and more useful. The final version of BusinessVue 2.0 is scheduled for release in April. To download a beta, visit the AlphaConnect site.
More News Articles at: www.alphaconnect.com
August 4, 1998: Yahoo
"Hot Technology Companies: 287 Firms Qualify In June and July"
March 16, 1998: PC Magazine
"BusinessVue 2.0 Finds Web Information for You" by Lisa Moskowitz [BusinessVue]
February 24, 1998: PC Magazine
"Software-a-Rama" by Michael J. Miller [BusinessVue]
February 1998: Windows Sources
"Business Intelligence" [BusinessVue]
January 21, 1998: C|Net
StockVue makes C|Net's "50 Fabulous Freebies" list
September 17, 1997: C|Net
"AlphaConnect BusinessVue 1.2: Making business sense out of the Web"
September 4, 1997: Yahoo/Business Wire
Alpha Microsystems named Hot U.S. Technology Company: Joins Apple Computer, Great Plains Software, Informix, Microsoft, Motorola, Quarterdeck, and Sun Microsystems.
Portico/GENERAL MAGIC........: Delivering Data via Cellular Phone
AlphaCONNECT technology is capable of delivering data to other devices besides computers, such as fax machines, alphanumeric pagers, and cellular phones. General Magic, Inc., a Sunnyvale, CA communications company (www.generalmagic.com) is in the business of delivering integrated voice and data information products and services. One such service is Portico, an automated office assistant with natural language speech recognition. A Portico subscriber can make queries verbally, such as "What's the stock price of Microsoft?" or "What's new at Intel?" and receive spoken results seconds later.
When Portico receives voice input from a client, it linguistically processes the sound, defines the words the customer is speaking, and decides what action is required. Portico understands more than one million different phrases and replies to the user with approximately 5,000 responses and helpful hints.
When a subscriber requests information about a business or company, Portico passes the request to an AlphaCONNECT server, which promptly delivers the information. The AlphaCONNECT server is set up to continually scan the Internet to assure that company demographics, news, filings, newsgroup postings, and stock quotes are up to date.
General Magic chose AlphaCONNECT technology as a back end to provide Portico with company information for the following three reasons:
AlphaCONNECT technology was easily integrated into the existing system. General Magic was using XML to communicate between Portico and its various servers. AlphaCONNECT supports XML and a wide range of other protocols.
AlphaCONNECT's architecture provided data independence. Technical details, such as Internet data sources, how information is parsed, and how it is retrieved, are completely isolated from the Portico server. As a result, if General Magic contracts with a different information provider, all that needs to change is a small AlphaCONNECT component, not Portico.
AlphaCONNECT is scalable in multiple directions and across multiple platforms. General Magic anticipates that Portico is going to achieve high market penetration, thus one or two servers may be sufficient to handle the increasing subscriber load. AlphaCONNECT's ability to deliver its functionality on a single server or on several dozen servers gives General Magic the scalability and flexibility it needs for growth.
EDGAR Online: A Real-Time, Online Web-Conversion Project
EDGAR Online is the most prodigious Web source for SEC filings and business intelligence about public U.S. companies (www.edgar-online.com). Because EDGAR Online attracts demographics that advertisers wish to court, many Web sites such as meta-indexes and business services have expressed an interest in connecting with EDGAR Online.
Most SEC filings that EDGAR Online posts are SGML documents, with occasional embedded tables. In order to make its services more responsive to subscribers and more desirable to Web partners, EDGAR Online determined that it needed to provide data in a variety of popular application file formats, chief among them Microsoft Excel worksheets. This is no simple task. In order to complete this data conversion project, EDGAR Online would have to perform the following tasks:
Scan all new filings
Convert them from SGML to other file formats, such as .XLS
Locate the embedded tables in each filing to assure proper formatting
Index all the filings and their tables in a massive database
Provide a Web server to provide lookup services and accept access requests
Convert filing tables to Excel format on demand
There were two additional requirements: one, the resulting server had to be able to post advertisements on the Web pages it created, and two, the conversion could in no way interfere with EDGAR Online's normal business operations. For enabling technology, EDGAR Online turned to AlphaCONNECT to utilize its communication and conversion capabilities.
The AlphaCONNECT EDGAR Server retrieves the latest SEC filings from EDGAR Online each day. The filings are scanned, subdivided, and indexed into a database. Server software accepts Web requests, interfaces with the database, and sends responses back. Spreadsheet worksheets are generated on demand when requested by Web visitors.
EDGAR Online is pleased with its AlphaCONNECT EDGAR Server. It emulates the look of each customer site that links to it, whether it is EDGAR Online or a Web partner. The conversion went well, largely because of the "meeting the data where it's at" philosophy behind AlphaCONNECT. Because the new service is ad-based, it will generate revenue for EDGAR Online without consuming any existing facilities, equipment, or personnel resources. |
