Mapping the New Landscape of Enterprise Search
May 23, 2011
What has happened to enterprise search? In a down economy, confusion among potential licensees has increased, based on the information I gathered for my forthcoming The Landscape of Enterprise Search, to be published by Pandia in June 2011. The price for the 186 page report is $20 US and 15 euros. Pandia and I decided that the information in the report should be available to those wrestling with enterprise search. With some “experts’ charging $500 and more for brief, pay to play studies, our approach is to provide substantive information at a very competitive price point.
In this completely new report, my team and I compress a complex subject into a manageable 150 pages of text. There are 30 pages of supplementary material, which you use as needed. The core of the report is an eyes-wide-open analysis of six key vendors: Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google, Microsoft, and Vivisimo.
You may recall that in the 2004 edition of the Enterprise Search Report, I covered about two dozen vendors. By the time I completed the third edition (the last one I wrote), the coverage had swelled to more than 28 vendors and to an unwieldy 600 plus pages of text.
In this new Landscape report, the publisher, my team, and I focused on the companies most often included in procurement reviews. With more than 200 vendors offering enterprise search solutions, there are 194 vendors who could argue that their system is better, faster, and cheaper than the vendors’ systems discussed in Landscape. That may be true, but to include a large number of vendors makes for another unwieldy report. I know from conversations with people who call me asking about another “encyclopedia of search” that most people want two or three profiles of search vendors. We maintain profiles for about 50 systems, and we track about 300 vendors in our in house Overflight system.
My team and I have tried to make clear the key points about the age and technical aspects of each vendor’s search solution. I am also focused on explaining what systems can and cannot do. If you want information that will strike you as new and different, you will want to get a copy of my new Landscape report.
Are you lost in the alchemist’s laboratory? This is a place where unscientific and fiddling take precedence over facts. Little wonder when “experts” explain enterprise search, there is no “lead into gold” moment. There is a mess. The New Landscape of Search helps you avoid the alchemists’ approach. Facts help reduce the risk in procuring an enterprise search solution.
Among the questions my team and I have tried to answer are:
- Why is enterprise so confusing and slippery? Why is it difficult to compare and contrast different vendors’ products and services?
- What does the Autonomy IDOL “black box” do?
- What is the core of Endeca’s computational method?
- Why does Exalead focus on applications and not key word searching?
- What does Google’s pricing of its appliances reveal about the scalability of the Google Search Appliance?
- How different is Microsoft’s version of the Fast search system from the version of the Fast search system available prior to the Microsoft purchase of Fast in 2008?
- What is the key technical pivot point for Vivisimo in its enterprise product?
- What are 20 other search systems a procurement team will want to know about?
- Who are the integrators and resellers of the six search vendors profiled in the report?
- What does the search jargon really mean?
Our approach is informed by the fact that we have built systems and sold them; for example, the Point (Top 5% of the Internet) which we started in late 1993 and eventually sold to Lycos in 1996. We struggled with hosted search in Year 2000 when we worked with Inktomi to index the content of the US Federal government for the original www.usa.gov project. We wrestled with commercial systems during independent verification and validation work for various Federal agencies, getting a first hand look at the actual costs of keeping mainstream search systems up and running. This work was “investigative” and quite interesting to perform.
My team and I value our experiences with systems and individual vendors. However, I avoid the “running for office” approach taken by most of the experts providing information about search and retrieval. The Landscape report offers information that is not in my Beyond Search blog. Like my for fee columns for Enterprise Technology Management and the Smart Business Network, the Landscape report has a high information payload.
If you are interested in enterprise search, you may find my Landscape report helpful. To get the lay of the land in enterprise search, please, check out Landscape. Keep in mind, however, that the map is not the territory. To see the full table of contents, more detail about the study, and to reserve your copy, send an email to seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2011
Definitely a sponsored post by myself.
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