Autonomy etalk Bags an Industry Award
July 8, 2008
When I give my lectures, I get dinged when I point out that the high profile enterprise search vendors are no longer in the search and retrieval business. This morning I was interviewed by a nice young journalist, and I trotted out my “search is dead” and the “big name vendors are morphing into other services”.
Let me call your attention to why I think “search” is a silly term to apply to what people must do to access information. Two heavy hitters in customer support–Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine (http://www.cismag.com)–awarded Autonomy the 2008 IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award. You can read the full story here. (This is a news release, and the link will go dead in a heartbeat. Click quickly, gentle reader.)
Is this search? Well, it depends on how you look at each user of the service. Here’s the official description of Autonomy etalk’s Qfiniti solution:
[A] robust and reliable IP recording for enterprise contact centers and mission critical business environments. This solution offers full customer interaction recording for compliance, risk management, and quality. Qfiniti delivers IP recording through SIP and vendor specific protocols for leading vendor platforms such as Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Nortel, and Alcatel-Lucent. Customers that use Qfiniti IP recording benefit from streamlined architecture, global scalability, centralized management, and flexible deployment through a single, unified platform.
If you are looking for something, this is a search system. If you are trying to manage a contact center, the Autonomy system is a god send. It puts many geese into one fenced area, making it easy to manage the unruly beasts.
Kudos to Autonomy, of course. I do want to offer several observations, apparently one of the reasons I have two or three regular readers of the Beyond Search Web log:
- Search is no longer the Playboy or Playgirl “model of the month”. Anyone with a year or so of computer science can download Lucene of Lemur FLAX and deploy a perfectly usable enterprise search system. Sure, you will not be able to index some documents, but most enterprise search systems are pretty erratic when it comes to indexing content, most users will adapt despite their grousing.
- The problems organizations have are where big money is at stake. Let’s face it. General document indexing is a secondary, maybe a tertiary concern. Call centers and customer support are money pits. Screw up customer support and you spend money and revenues drop. Do customer support intelligently and you reduce costs and revenue bleeding can be slowed, maybe revenues can rise. So it doesn’t take an MBA from Wharton to figure out that if an organization has $700,000 to spend, a vendor who solves the customer support type problem will get more of the available money.
- The issue is information access as it relates to work employees do. Search–at least key word search–forces employees to spend time hunting for information-filled nuggets. Wrong. Employees want answers quickly. A vendor who can show useful information access in the context of work managers want employees to do will win contracts.
So, I am quite confident that when Autonomy wins this type of award I have another case example to support my content that search vendors aren’t going to be in the traditional search business much longer, not if these companies want to keep growing.
Agree? Disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2008
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