Is IBM Reshaping Its Approach to Enterprise Search?
April 25, 2011
IBM is a mysterious and baffling outfit to me. One day I get a call from eager IBMers panting to find out what I know about the vendors in enterprise search. content processing, and semantics. Then weeks, maybe months go by, before an IBM person emails me a message like “We’ve been really busy” or “We don’t have a very big budget but maybe you could talk for free”. The classic IBM input I had this year is from a person who agreed to participate in a Search Wizards Speak interview via email. Months after the deadline, I was told an excuse similar to those I heard when I was a freshman in college and a classmate was explaining that his mother and dog died on the same day.
A better search or a more complex guitar? Source: http://www.heirloomradio.com/history.htm
Imagine my surprise when I received a link to a story from Yomiuri Online. “Natural Language Analysis Software, IBM Japan” contained what may be an compass reading about IBM’s enterprise search strategy. In a nutshell, IBM may be hooking together a content analytics component with the Lucene based OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1. Instead of offering what I can download from Apache or Lucid Imagination, IBM has grafted on text analytics.
The product, which becomes available on April 26, 2011, in Japan. IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search mashes up text mining software and information retrieval software. For good measure, IBM includes natural language analysis technology.
The other shocker, if the person translating the article was accurate, is that IBM will compete aggressively on price. I am not sure how IBM prices its products in Japan, but the software could, for all practical purposes be free. IBM makes its money on hardware and services with services becoming increasingly important in my opinion.
The product will handle social content, the unstructured data that plagues customer service operations, and email, among other source and file types. The system classifies content and outputs analytics, which may mean anything from a simple frequency count to a more elaborate SPSS type of function. If prices are indeed low, my hunch is that the SPSS type horsepower will not be present in full royal wedding regalia.
Some questions:
- Will this approach make IBM a bigger contender in enterprise search? No. IBM may be trying to carve a new niche for itself but Autonomy and Exalead are already there.
- Will this play explain the role of Watson or what IBM is doing with the dozens of analytics companies it has acquired? No.
- Is this a new trend in enterprise search? No.
- Will IBM continue to make sales to organizations who want to “go IBM”? Yep.
Vendors have been trying to distance themselves from the word “search” for years. In a sense, IBM is just late to the party. But with its financial resources and clout, tardiness may not matter.
Stephen E Arnold, April 25, 2011
Freebie unlike IBM professional services or a technical roll for a FRU.
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