PR Push for Azaleos and Fast Search

March 14, 2012

My email overflowed this morning with descriptions of Azaleos, its expertise in Microsofty stuff, and Fast Search. I am on the ball with regard to Fast Search, its legal back story, and the issues associated with getting the system to deliver useful results to users on time and on budget. You will find the Azaleos blog quite interesting. I noted no recent postings about Fast Search. For some current information about the search system, you may want to check out this Beyond Search write up. I ran a query using the Azaleos search system and got three hits about Fast Search. The coverage of search suggests that Azaleos may be succumbing to a communications expert’s inputs about how to sell search services.

What was new was the statement in MSPmentor’s “Azaleos Cloud Gets Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010”. How does a Microsoft partner “get” Fast Search? I don’t know. Maybe pay a fee? Here’s the passage I noted:

…the company’s Managed Enterprise Search solution addresses a different need. It gives enterprises the ability to remotely design, configure, monitor and manage FAST Search Server 2010. According to Azaleos, the development is big news for its customers because the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 can perform searches in “an interactive and visual format,” in addition to the basic search functions that the Microsoft SharePoint Server provides. The FAST Search Server is a high-visibility solution, which brings its own set of complex issues to the table for enterprise IT departments. But Azaleos claims its Managed Enterprise Search solution eliminates the challenges associated with high visibility applications and can keep the FAST Search Server available and running at top speed.

My thoughts after reading this included:

There is an implicit assumption that Microsoft’s cloud search will be Fast centric. My own view of this is that the assumption may be out of kilter. The reasons include performance, extensibility, and customization. Fast Search can be turned into a capable performer, but the “cloud” angle implies a certain standardization of features. So of Fast Search’s vast capabilities what will the core service do? Keywords, clustering, linguistic analysis, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, relationship mapping, etc. My point is that customers may want all of these functions and that suggests the Fast Search from Azaleos may be very different from the Fast Search marketing collateral’s assertions.
Can Azaleos maintain an “interactive and visual format” when the content throughput increases. The challenge of keeping indexes fresh equates to resources. Resources, in my experience, cost money. The fix may be to gate how much data are processed in order to keep the fees acceptable to customers. Price spikes are not encouraging to some licensees in my experience.
The assertion of “available and running at top speed” is an interesting one. My thought was, “Relative to what?” Are we comparing a small corpus with weekly index refreshes or are we talking about 100 million documents refreshed in near real time? I am not sure Fast in an on premises installation with original Fast engineers babysitting the hugely complex system with often unexpected dependencies can be a challenge to keep perking along at optimum performance levels.

I want to watch how this business unfolds. After all, a PR blitz which puts several stories in front of me signals some real enthusiasm on the part of the Azaleos stakeholders.

Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.