IBM OmniFind Affordable?
December 14, 2010
The Search and Findability blog recently published OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1 – new capabilities discussed over breakfast, heralding the achievements of the latest version of IBM’s search platform. According to the post, “Apart from a large number of improvements in the interface, the change to basing the new solution on open source (Lucene) has proven to be a genius by-pass of some of OmniFinds previous shortcomings.” New features including but certainly not limited to type ahead, faceted search, search within results are discussed in sufficient detail.
The author does mention a lingering issue, the licensing model, and cites an August Beyond Search post by Stephen E. Arnold detailing just that. Then the topic fades as rapidly as it was euphemistically glossed over. For all the remodeling of the search platform’s capabilities, there still seems to be no real adjustments to the IBM pricing model revolving around a la carte type fees and license connectors. What about customer support and API potential?
More than once it is stated that the new features make OmniFind 9.1 worth taking a look at. If IBM still hasn’t offered any concrete affordability or support solutions, is that true?
Sarah Rogers, December 14, 2010
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7 Responses to “IBM OmniFind Affordable?”
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Hi Sarah,
What changes were you hoping for, or expecting?
Regards,
Paul O’Hagan
Offering Manager – OmniFind
pohagan@ca.ibm.com
You are right, the post highlights the features that comes out of the box in the new version of OmniFind and puts very little focus on the technical capabilities. There are obviously a number of shortcomings that are yet not solved, but if one has been working with previous versions of OmniFind the changes are quite extensive.
Enterprise Search has not been IBM’s strongest card, but the development is now heading in a good and new direction where the customer is paying for integration and not functionality – so yes, I definitely think OmniFind is worth taking a look at 🙂
..and yes, the licensing model and support are still questionable and it is a mystery why almost all the big search vendors (apart from IBM, also Autonomy, FAST etc) have such a complicated licensing model. All of them have some connectors that are included in the licensing and others that are not. The same goes for support, where the annual “maintenance fee” often allows you to send in a number of tickets to a support team – not always the best way to handle customer satisfaction.
IBM’s new platform is, due to the open source swift, a more complete and open product. During spring we will handle a few upgrading projects – and I will be happy to share my thought on successes, challenges and areas of improvement.
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