SurfRay Round Up
October 24, 2008
SurfRay and its products have triggered a large number of comments on this Web log. On my recent six day trip to Europe, I was fortunate to be in a position to talk with people who knew about the company’s products. I also toted my Danish language financial statements along, and I was able to find some people to walk me through the financials. Finally, I sat down and read the dozens of postings that have accumulated about this company.
I visited the company on a trip to Copenhagen five or six years ago. I wrote some profiles about the market for SharePoint centric search, sent bills, got paid, and then drifted away from the company. I liked the Mondosoft folks, but I live in rural Kentucky. One of my friends owned a company which ended up in the SurfRay portfolio. I lost track of that product. I recall learning that SurfRay gobbled up an outfit called Ontolica. My recollection was that, like Interse and other SharePoint centric content processing companies’ technology, Ontolica put SharePoint on life support. What this means is that some of SharePoint’s functions work but not too well. Third party vendors pay Microsoft to certify one or more engineers in the SharePoint magic. Then those “certified” companies can sell products to SharePoint customers. If Microsoft likes the technology, a Microsoft engineer may facilitate a deal for a “certified” vendor. I am hazy on the ways in which the Microsoft certification program works, but I have ample data from interviews I have conducted that “certification” yields sales.
An Ontolica results list.
Why is this important? It’s background for the points I want to set forth as “believed to be accurate” so the SurfRay folks can comment, correct, clarify, and inform me on what the heck is going on at SurfRay. Here are the points I about which comments are in bounds.
First, the 2007 financial statement suggests that the company lost money in its last full fiscal year. Like most financial documents, there are many words and only the numbers mandated by a country’s accounting requirements. The one anomaly I noticed in the financial statement was a big number for “goodwill”. What struck me as unusual was reporting “goodwill” as an asset. When I dropped the goodwill number, the SurfRay financials did not improve. This is no big deal, but it may explain why some of the comments in this Web log allege that SurfRay is a slow pay. It’s tough to pay if you don’t have sufficient cash. I can’t resolve the pay disputes; I can only summarize what I think I learned from the financial statement.
Second, the company is in business. SurfRay invited me to visit their offices when I am in Copenhagen in early November. I will try to make the time. If there is an office, and there are people who want me to drop in and get a demo, I have to conclude that the company is open for business. I will try to get a sense of what the company is selling, how the products are fitting into Microsoft’s changing SharePoint environment, and what’s on the product roadmap. Interse is expanding in the US. If Ontolica is as good as I remember, then it follows in my mind that Ontolica should be able to expand its US market. If one product sells and the others don’t, my thought is, “Kill the losers and feed the winners.”
Third, there are mixed signals in the comments to this Web log about the company and the way it handles its employees and contractors. I think that the people who are happy with SurfRay are telling the truth as each of these people understands it. I think that those who are annoyed with SurfRay are also telling the truth as each of these people understand it. Right now, the annoyed folks outnumber the happy folks. My hunch is that there is a story in the annoyance category, but I need more facts.
Fourth, it doesn’t take much knowledge of economics to understand that the noose is getting tight around the throat of search and content processing companies. Therefore, SurfRay, like Mahalo and Yahoo, will have to work hard to succeed in today’s market. That means solid customer support and effective engineering. A slip on either of these crucial functions, even companies with tons of cash can be crippled. In a Darwinian world, successful companies have to have agile and quit witted.
I have documented the difficulties of several companies in this Web log. You can read about Delphes, Entopia, and TeezIR as well as Yahoo’s and Microsoft Fast’s travails.
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2008
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5 Responses to “SurfRay Round Up”
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[…] I have summarized several of the themes from my write ups and from the posts to the SurfRay thread. You can find this article at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/10/24/surfray-round-up/ or click here. […]
First I like to thank you Stephen for your work inside the search community, Second I like to thank the head of Research and development Torben for his answering of the question on ”did SurfRay missed the wave” section.
But it raises a couple of new question for me.
Related to the speed index I fully understand that this is an indexing engine, but the question was WHY haven’t Surfray used this powerfull hyperoptimising index instead of just relying on the slow index engine in Sharepoint. And by not integrating and improve a little on the Sharepoint search why do any organization need to buy it and why buy it from Surfray (small company who may or may not provide service) when it can be bought from a must bigger company like BA-insight???
The attached roadmap for 2009 also gives me a bad feeling as I can see that Reporting now is postponed another 6-9 month!!! And at the same time Surfray state that Ontolica has first priority on R&D resources??!! Can someone explain this for me….
Torben explained that second priority is Mondosoft Site Search, which I personally liked and it was also what my company used until bad service from the new owner got us to change search engine, but again later he state no plans yet to upgrade or replace the Enterprise Search offering. Could anyone at SurfRay please tell me again WHY we should go back to your Site Search when we have Omniture Site Search from a NASDAQ company providing more key functionality – Better relevancy etc, than Mondosoft’s 2 year old site search and the cost is a 1/10 of what Surfray offers?
I have been a loyal fan of Mondosoft’s search and the support and maintenance back in 2006-7 unfortunately nothing on this site has proven to me that Surfray is on the right track and it doesn’t make me “want to come home”.
Anyway Bill stated “Let me say unequivocally that I am now the CEO of SurfRay”, and you properly are Bill, but on surfray’s website under executive team, Martin Veise is mentioned first in a very long line of Member of the GROUP MANAGEMENT?! Is it normal that Chairman of the board is heading Group Management or ?
Lars /
Hi All
I am the CEO of Ciklum, we started the development of Ontolica in early 2007 for a company called Mondosoft, who went bankrupt and sold the software to Surfray in October 2007. We still dispute in court this sale, since we have the legal rights for this software until paid.
This ment however that we since October 2007 started working for Surfray to improve Ontolica, but after paying a bit in December 2007 we recieved no furter payment from Surfray and finally in April 2008 terminated the work for them and handed over the matter to our lawyers.
This means that the entire development team behind Ontolica stopped working and you should not expect much further to happen here.
We have in late October 2008 won the case against Surfray and are now moving to “collection”, hope it will happen soon but I expect that we will see a company with no money and we will see the company going directly to bankrupsy as soon as one of the collection cases hits the collection court.
Anybody in the same situation as us are welcome to contact me, maybe we can work together to bring this further than just collection, I am here talking about the obvious fraud made by Martin Veise.
BR
Torben
Torben,
Thanks for your opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 6, 2008
please also see the new comments on http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/08/29/surfray-has-the-company-missed-the-search-wave