Here’s the latest Buzz on Inforbix
iPad App Provides On-the-Go Product Data
What engineer doesn’t want access to product data on the go? It’s a need that shows no signs of abating, particularly in light of the increased use of outsourced design partners and the trend toward individuals working remotely, whether in satellite development groups or home offices.
With that mobility in mind, Inforbix, a company specializing in intelligent CAD and product data access, has released its first iPad app designed to let users search and access engineering data no matter where they are working. Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO of Inforbix and an active blogger in the PLM and CAD space, told us that the free app is meant to work in conjunction with and as an extension of Inforbix’s cloud-based collection of integrated applications, which, in concert, help users find, reuse, and share product-related data.
Inforbix Announces Breakthrough Product Data Apps at SWW 2012 That Revolutionize How SolidWorks Users Extract More Value from Engineering and Manufacturing Data
Inforbix, the leader in manufacturing cloud-based product data access applications, http://www.inforbix.com, is announcing two revolutionary new products data apps that seamlessly aggregate product data from different file types, sources, and locations. The new Inforbix apps will help customers get more out of their product data and become more productive while improving decision-making. Inforbix will announce the apps at SolidWorks World 2012 in San Diego, California, Feb. 12-15.
“We are delighted to be a part of SolidWorks World 2012. Inforbix is proud to be a SolidWorks partner, and together with SolidWorks will help provide our customers excellent product data access capabilities,” CEO Oleg Shilovitsky said.
Inforbix Cracks Next Generation Search for SolidWorks Users
Search means advertising to most Google users. In an enterprise—according to the LinkedIn discussions about enterprise search—the approach is anchored in the 1990s. The problem is that finding information requires a system which can handle content types that are of little interest to lawyers, accountants, and MBAs running a business today.
Without efficient access to such content as engineering drawings, specifications, quality control reports, and run-of-the-mill office information—costs go up. What’s worse is that more time is needed to locate a prior version of a component or locate the supplier who delivered on time and on budget work to the specification. So expensive professionals end up performing what I call Easter egg hunt research. The approach involves looking for colleagues, paging through lists of file names, and the “open, browse, close” approach to information retrieval.
Link Power in Product Data
Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO, Inforbix recently commented on the exciting events that will be happening this year in the Semantic Web world, commenting, “One of the events I’m afraid I may miss is the upcoming SEMTECHBIZ in Berlin this February. I was catching online program and session information for the conference. One of the sessions caught my attention: The simple power of the link. Richard Wallis, technology evangelist of Kasabi will be talking about the power of linked data and some examples of implementations.”
Search Goes Mobile with Inforbix iPad App
As the new year rang in, Inforbix’s COO Vic Sanchez began shooting a movie. The star of his short film was a mobile app, the outcome of the company’s efforts to bring search functions to mobile devices. With the help of a digital camera mounted on a tripod, Sanchez finished his movie and posted it to the company blog, along with the characteristic teaser line for movie trailers: Coming Soon!
This week, Inforbix‘s iPad app makes its debut on Apple app store. It’s described as “Semantic technology-based cloud apps for retrieving manufacturing & engineering product data across different CAD, PDM, & PLM systems & file types.”
Cloud Product Data Solutions Supports Manufacturing
Data applications help manufacturing companies find, re-use, and share product data.
Inforbix LLC (Chestnut Hill, MA) has announced Inforbix Product Data Apps, a cloud-centric service for small and large manufacturing companies that is intended to help engineers, project managers, and other team members find, re-use, and share product data from disparate sources and file types quickly and easily. A new service, Inforbix, offers for immediate deployment two apps: Inforbix Search for retrieving relevant product data and Inforbix Tables for configuring and presenting product data. Inforbix is offered on a low-cost annual subscription fee basis.
Editor’s Pick: Cloud Product Data Solution Supports Manufacturing
Data applications help manufacturing companies find, re-use, and share product data.
Dear Desktop Engineering Reader: When I was a kid, every Fall the three TV networks would roll out their new programs at once. Now, new shows across hundreds of broadcasters pop up all the time. I have 500 channels, and the guide to what’s on what channel when makes finding the data a tedious affair. Manufacturing once had annual or semi-annual cycles for upgrades and new products. Not now. Things come out all the time. Great for users, but a nightmare for design teams. The tedium of manually finding designs, technical data, supplier information, etc. then reusing and sharing data introduces all sorts of stresses on your teams and processes as well as heightens the chance for scrap, rework, and recall expenses. Traditional PDM schemes, while great for their scope, are just not geared for that part of modern design cycles. This is what makes today’s Pick of the Week something you need to know about.
Inforbix, a new cloud-based service, opened for business this week. There are three key reasons why Inforbix is a must-know. One, Inforbix is designed to helps engineers, project managers, and your full product development team find, re-use, and share product data from disparate sources and file types quickly and easily. Not just a Google dump of finds, but connected and intelligently presented results. Two, it “understands” manufacturing data — CAD files, BOMs, assemblies, office docs, etc. Three, cloud-based means everyone can access it from everywhere and your IT burdens are less in terms of maintaining software and adding more storage and all that.
Search: The New Frontier in Data Management
I can’t remember when I stopped organizing my emails and file folders. But I do remember why I stopped. At some point, I came to the realization that, instead of spending my precious time meticulously archiving my documents in sub-directories (and sub-sub directories and sub-sub-sub-categories), I could rely on Windows’ search function to locate what I needed, when I needed.
To clarify, I still save documents by loosely defined categories: Work, Family, Friends, Finances, and so on. But I no longer obsess over micro-categories, like interview notes from meeting with mobile app developers at Macworld 2010. In the past (say, 10 years ago), it was important for me to micro-manage my documents at that level because I had no easy way to locate a piece of information pertaining to a certain project, created on a certain date. I had to impose an artificial structure on my data pile because personal computers weren’t sophisticated enough to discern and handle unstructured data. Today, my email client (happens to be Windows Live mail) can locate a cookie recipe from 2004 buried in my inbox faster than I can, because the software, running on modern CPUs, can peruse many more documents in a second than I can with my human eyes.
Inforbix Announces Cloud-Based Product Data Apps
Inforbix has announced a new cloud product data solution for manufacturing, Product Data Apps: “The revolutionary cloud-centric service helps engineers, project managers and other team members quickly and easily find, re-use, and share product data from disparate sources and file types.” Inforbix CEO Oleg Shilovitsky stated, “Money and time are wasted because most product data management professionals cannot locate the specific information needed without a manual search. Our system makes it easy for an engineer to pinpoint designs, specifications, and even quality control data with a mouse click. After extensive validation, we learned that as much as 40 percent of productive engineering time is wasted in data management activities. Inforbix reduces much of that wasted time.”
Inforbix Poised to Shake Up Engineering Design Search
In an exclusive interview with ArnoldIT.com, Oleg Shilovitsky, co-founder and CEO of Inforbix, provides an in-depth look at his information retrieval system for engineering and product design. His firm Inforbix has been operating in a low profile and is now beginning to attract the attention of engineering professionals struggling with conventional data management tools for parts, components, assemblies, and other engineered pieces.
Most search systems are blind to the data locked in engineering design tools and systems. For example, in a typical manufacturing company, a traditional search system would index the content on an Exchange server, email, proposals in Word files, and maybe some of the content residing in specialized systems used for accounts payable or inventory. When these items are indexed, most are displayed in a hit list like a Google results page or in a point-and-click interface with hot links to documents that may or may not be related to the user’s immediate business information need.
Cloud CAD search is here. How to start using Inforbix in 20 minutes
By Josh Mings pub date on October 25th, 2011
First, I totally GANKED (part of) that headline from the Inforbix post on the same topic. That’s how I roll. But let’s hold back the onslaught on data digging for a sec and address something. Inforbix. I understand. It’s hard to say it… without shredding your throat lining by screaming it as loud as you can. So, go ahead. Get it out of your system. Now, let’s move on. Inforbix has launched. What is it? From their site, “Inforbix is a web-based data consumption solution available for purchase on a yearly subscription basis.” In other words, search all of your CAD data, wherever it is, from wherever you are. The base package is FREE. We’ve covered how it works. Here’s how to get started using it.
New Startup: Inforbix. Search, Navigate, Slice and Dice That Data
People are cruel. They sit around all day creating this and that, saving it here, copying it there and finally emailing it to everyone… multiple times. I’m one of those people. We pretty much all are… except that guy in the corner with the typing speed of a dead squirrel. We create, we store, we send. However, the difficult part is often the finding. That’s where Inforbix comes in. A new start-up in the CAD space until coming out of stealth mode this week, they’re taking on our data. Details are sparse, but here’s what we can tell ya.
What Is Inforbix?
Inforbix is a startup co-founded by my good friend Oleg Shilovitsky who likes to explain it as “Google for product data in a manufacturing company“. So you might think of it as an enterprise search engine like Exalead. I did too. That changed after I sat down with Oleg at COFES 2011 and understood what Inforbix was really about.
The best way to explain something is to use an example. Say there is an manufacturer that designs and manufactures highly customizable electrical components. The company grew organically and now their product data is spread across three different systems. Now suppose someone in the company gets a call from a customer about a certain part. This is what happens. The part number given by the customer is fed into Oracle in order to get the internal identification number. That is then fed into the PDM system to get the file name of the drawing of the part. Finally the file is located on the server and opened in the CAD system to process the request further.
CAD INSIDER: Inforbix Aims to be the Google of CAD Metadata
Oleg Shilovitsky maybe best know to us as the most prolific blogger on the subject of PLM (see plm thnk tank and Beyond PLM). His posts are familiar to readers of TenLinks. But Oleg is about to embark on a new venture, this time with a commercial software product. Along with partner Anatoly Savin, Oleg will soon make available Inforbix, a data search tool still in beta, recently received the recipient of Top Technology Award at COFES 2011.
Linking Disparate Data in Manufacturing
A recent article from Inforbix discusses the difficulties of linking data in manufacturing businesses. The article notes, “Product data in all its forms is located and sourced in different places in manufacturing companies. Accessing product data is, moreover, confounded by how different systems deploy different methodologies (or languages) for how they keep track of it. For example, an item known in engineering as a ‘Part’ may be called a ‘Component’ in production… What I’m trying to say here is that the mixture of different vocabularies or vernacular used in a typical manufacturing company makes it difficult for different systems to have a macro understanding of how product data located in different places is connected together.”
Inforbix – a look from aside or Web 3.0 is born now
This short note, prepared with the initiative of isicad.ru editorial, combines elements of my general vision as an architect and a kind of interview, born out of my post and its comments that were made by Oleg Shilovitsky and Andrey Shteynbrekher (author of the blog “On Automation” and well-known expert in the field of PDM / ERP). During this interview-dialogue and the preparation of this note it became clear to me how the problem of information complexity of today’s design process could be solved.
For those of you familiar with the key players at Dassault, ENOVIA, and SmarTeam over the years, you probably know Oleg Shilovitsky. Oleg is the former Chief Technology Officer for SmarTeam, and is one of the founders of a new product data applications company, Inforbix. Simply put, Inforbix is in the early stages of developing novel technologies for use in the engineering and manufacturing software space.
Inforbix: An Interview with Oleg Shilovitsky by ArnoldIT
After a series of meetings in Boston last week, I met Oleg Shilovitsky, publisher of an interesting Web log PLM Think Tank and the Beyond PLM Web log. I had learned about Mr. Shilovitsky’s stealth start up Inforbixand, after months of sleuthing, convinced him to meet with me at Thai Basil on Newberry Street. What interested me about Mr. Shilovitsky’s venture was its applicability to manufacturing and production. Most enterprise search and content processing systems tackle email, standard office documents created in Word, and data locked in enterprise software systems like Lotus Notes or SAP’s aging R/3 platforms. Not Mr. Shilovitsky. His focus is mission critical information that most vendors ignore or cannot process with their established methods.
What Inforbix is Doing for Engineers
A recent article from Inforbix comments on a quote from Lynda Moulton, writer of Semantic Software Technologies. Moulton said, “Besides baked-in intelligence for answering human questions using natural language processing (NLP) to search, an answer-platform like Watson requires tons of data. Also, data must be assembled in conceptually and contextually relevant databases for good answers to occur. When documents and other forms of electronic content are fed to a knowledgebase for semantic retrieval, finely crafted metadata (data describing the content) and excellent vocabulary control add enormous value. These two content enhancers, metadata and controlled vocabularies, can transform good search into excellent search.”
The semantics of product data
The Inforbix approach assumes that the engineer does not know what is needed. Most engineers working on a new design only have a hint or some related information about the assembly, the other components in the system, and the previous designs stored on the engineering department’s server. The Inforbix system allows the user to follow a system of links and semantic references that allow the engineer to discover data and information to help solve a specific problem or complete a task.
Inforbix. The New Data Search and How it Works.
It’s all about the information… kind of. It’s more about not succumbing to twisting apart LCD screens and keyboards because you can’t find the information. Inforbix is here to address just that – finding data… anywhere.As I’ve said previously, the difficult part is often the finding. Now, for the first time, you’ll be able to see how the Inforbix search works, how it finds data and how it allows you to view that data – right along with whatever else you’re using to find data.
Inforbix to Integrate Tech Skills of DS and Sales Experience of Autodesk
Inforbix has just announced that Vic Sanchez joined the company management team as COO. From April 2000 to Oct 2004 Vic was the Managing Director and VP Sales of Autodesk EMEA. This probably means that Inforbix is approaching the stage of unveiling and active distribution its products and solutions.
An US based company, Inforbix was quite recently established by Oleg Shilovitsky (CEO) together with Anatoly Savin (CIO). To characterize what is Inforbix, I use an extended version of the title of my post presenting the new company “Oleg Shilovitsky unveils his Inforbix to technologically arrange and maintain efficiently operable mixtures of chaotic product data“(this formulae is my own interpretation of what Inforbix is doing!).
Make Manufacturing Easier — At Least the Dealing With Data Part of It
When you think of manufacturing companies, you probably picture conveyor belts, milling machines, spot welders, and a whole slew of stamping, polishing, extracting and reformulating processes going on at the factory. But what you also should think about is all the darn data around the products these companies produce that resides in different files and across multiple applications and databases, and how navigating and presenting it in a way to get some meaning out of it can seem as complicated a process as operating a gear cutting machine or taking on a precision grinder.
Inforbix: Product Data Applications using Semantic Data Technologies
First announced in Nov 2010, Inforbix, a new player in the product data management field, recently entered into next phase of its business. The company ran Beta testing program, refreshed website and published new videos. We contacted Oleg Shilovitsky, Inforbix CEO and founder, who kindly agreed to answer our questions.
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