Enterprise Search Ignorance Can Be Costly
May 20, 2013
Why What You Do Not Can Bite Your Pocketbook. Marketers Have Their Interests Front and Center, Not the Customers’ Interests
A few days ago, I sat through several presentations about enterprise search. The systems struck me as quite similar. The emphasis was placed on providing basic information access to users. For the purpose of this short essay, I will not make distinctions among search vendors which position themselves as providers of analytics, business intelligence, discovery, and Big Data access, among other synonyms for search and information retrieval.
The missing pieces of the cost puzzle can make budget deficits a reality. A happy quack to Vermont’s Department of Information and Innovation. See the discussion to drive down the cost of doing business. States are paragons of fiscal probity.
However, the talks caused me to reflect on what the vendors left out of their presentations.
Here’s a checklist of the omissions in commercial systems which are now being marketed as an alternative to the high profile and expensive solutions available from Dassault, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark, Microsoft, and Oracle, Each of these large enterprise software vendors acquired one or more search systems. Each has taken steps to integrate search with other enterprise software solutions.
The gap the acquisition of such companies as Autonomy, Exalead, and others is now left to smaller and less well know vendors of search. I don’t want to mention these companies by name, but a quick search of Bing or Google will surface many of the firms vying to become the next $100 million vendor of enterprise search systems.
The first omission is a component which can acquire, normalize, and present textual content in a form the search system can process. For newcomers to enterprise search, the content acquisition process can add significantly to the cost of deploying an enterprise search system. Connectors are available from a number of specialist vendors. Most of the search vendors provide some basic tools for acquiring content. Depending on the organization, the vendor provided tools may be adequate for acquiring documents in text or Web pages in HTML. Other document types may be more problematic. A vendor offering a system which requires documents to be in a supported XML format often emphasizes the system’s ability to slice, dice, parse, and perform certain operations with alacrity. What’s omitted is the time, cost, technical expertise, and work flows required to get content into the search system. Cloud based enterprise search solutions and certain lower cost enterprise search systems leave content to the licensee or offer for fee consulting services to assist with these often complex activities.
Second, the lower cost enterprise search systems stress that the licensee van customize the user interface. On the surface, inclusion of a basic search interface is one way to speed system deployment. However, the default interface may require customization and then integration into the licensee’s particular environment. Most of the enterprise search systems dismiss the interface as an important but not particularly difficult job. Interface, as the licensee may discover, is one of the more difficult aspects of a search deployment. As some vendors shift to a services model, interface work can be a difficult-to-control cost as the licensee iterates toward one or more suitable interfaces.
Third, enterprise search is often provided as part of another application. Some enterprise search vendors provide guidance for integrating the search function with an enterprise system. Google, for example, provided this type of information when the company was aggressively marketing the Google Search Appliance after 2006. Some of the smaller search vendors offer an application programming interface and documentation to assist the licensee. In some cases, the integration information is adequate. In other cases, particularly for the integration of the search function into multiple, proprietary enterprise applications, the licensee must solve the problem directly or hire outside experts to assist with the integration.
There are other aspects of an enterprise search system which can produce additional work and add costs to a search system deployment. My point in this short essay is to make clear that enterprise search involves more than the basic type of search system shown below:
This picture omits a number of wrapper functions which can add to the cost of an enterprise search implementation. These wrappers may not be included in a cloud search solution from Amazon (which one integrator has described as “raw”) or a similar vendor. Source: A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines
Christian Middleton, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, page 8. No date.
It is in fact true that an enterprise search system may be downloaded from a vendor offering a very attractive license fee or without charge from an open source repository. The cost of the core functionality often makes up only a modest percentage of the total cost of an enterprise search system deployment. A good search deployment team will track direct costs, indirect costs, and include cost estimates to cover putting the search system in an operational context.
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
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