Dassault Reaches to Australia New Zealand
September 12, 2013
I have lost track of Dassault, a firm which acquired Exalead a few years ago. Exalead dropped off my radar with its cloud approach to 360 degree information access. I do get an annual request for me to listen without compensation to a “briefing” about the Exalead technology. I have severe webinar fatigue, and I have a tough time differentiating the marketing pitches from different search vendors. As I approach 70 years of age, the diagrams strike me as interchangeable. The terminology used reminds me of a cheerleading session. The PowerPoints are little more than placards saying, “Big Data, Analytics, NoSQL, CRM. Go Team.” The only thing missing from the briefings is a band and hard data about strong revenue and profits generated by the company’s must-have products.
Search is repositioning in an effort to avoid marginalization. Most of the go-to customers already have up to five enterprise search systems. My hunch is that most large organizations are unaware of the total number of “findability” and “business intelligence” systems in their organizations.
Vendors, recognizing a saturated market, have had to either sell out (Brainware, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search & Transfer, ISYS Search, and Vivisimo) or jump from one buzzword to another in a quest for additional venture funding and revenue.
Cheerleading is show business. Image courtesy of the US Department of Defense at http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=44522
I read “Firstservis Partners Dassault Systèmes to Push Big Data App.” The write up said:
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform brings structure, meaning and accessibility to data across the heterogeneous enterprise information cloud and combines the sophisticated search, access and reporting typically associated with databases with the speed, scalability and simplicity of the Web.
More interesting to me is the reason for this jump to Big Data. According to the write up:
“Their decision to re-platform their business on EXALEAD applications was then validated by Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant Report where the brand was named as the most visionary of enterprise search vendors,” he [Firstservis director, Andrew Young] said.
What I find interesting is that an azure chip consulting firm opened the eyes of Dassault to what it could do with Exalead technology. Now Dassault bought Exalead in 2010 for about $160 million. After three years, a third party has guided a scientific company with 11,000 passionate people, 1790,000 customers, 3,500 (3,501 I suppose if I count Firstservis), and “long term strategy” (See http://www.3ds.com/about-3ds/).
With the pundits and poobahs hoarse from repetition of the “Big Data, Analytics, and CRM” cheer, I found the story interesting and indicative of the challenges those with “enterprise search systems” face.
Will the fans show up for the game? Image courtesy of NOAA at http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/GEOID/GSVS11/images/Longhorn_Stadium_Flippable_Seats.jpg
My hunch is that enterprise search remains a problem. The marketing issue becomes a communication problem. When a company cannot find information, enterprise search is the culprit. Most firms have quite a bit of search experience. Dissatisfaction among users is the norm. So a new positioning is required not just by Dassault but by most of the vendors who used to be in the search business.
Consider these changes:
- Autonomy is part of Hewlett Packard’s enterprise push for Big Data
- Brainware is a back office component of a Lexmark unit
- Coveo, a decade old start up, is chasing customer support. (Coveo has absorbed $34.7 million since 2005, according to Crunchbase.)
- Fast Search & Technology is a widget for SharePoint at a company which is undergoing significant change
- ISYS Search Software is a function in a Lexmark subsidiary
- Vivisimo, now a part of IBM, is in the Big Data business. Never mind that Vivisimo’s core technology categorizes text search results.
Newcomers like In-Q-Tel backed firms like Digit al Reasoning, Palantir, and Recorded Future among others rely on analytics magic and Hollywood style interfaces. Under the surface, these next generate systems are not much different from the decades old content processing system developed by i2 Group Ltd., now part of IBM’s camper stuffed with technologies from SPSS, Cognos, and open source repositories.
The larger question is, “Will there be enough customers to go around for the dozens of search-centric firms needing big revenue to stay in the game?”
My hunch is that as stakeholders and investors grow increasingly concerned about the performance of search-centric vendors, more marketing will be the first line of defense. Then there will be changes at the top of these companies. Finally, the majority of the search and content processing companies will find themselves in a pickle.
Who remembers the lessons of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Siderean, Speed of Mind and dozens of other search and content processing vendors that have shut their doors. Recently I reviewed my analyses of these firms. What jumped out at me was:
- The firms tried many positionings in a quest for revenues
- The companies embraced partners to help generate sales
- Their search technologies were morphed into business intelligence, decision support systems, and help desk solutions.
Search remains a tough problem in organizations. The search industry is now facing a persistent problem created by customers’ previous experience with search systems that did not deliver significant value. Search does not equate to value in many cases. Cheerleading does add pizzazz. I am not sure how much value cheerleading adds to a technical system which do not allow most users to cope with finding information quickly, easily, and intuitively.
When an enterprise search system user says, “I want a system that works just like Google,” what does it say about search vendors when the companies shift to the litany of “Big Data, Analytics, CRM”? To get an answer, I assume that buyers and vendors will turn to poobahs, mavens, and search engine optimization experts. For me, cheerleading is most MBA-type effort.
When it comes to finding information, the past casts a long, dark shadow. The good news is that in today’s world, the details of search system flops is lost in the news cycle. In this situation, cheerleading may be the easiest way to demonstrate how search works. As i experience every single day, finding information is getting harder, not easier.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2013
Comments
3 Responses to “Dassault Reaches to Australia New Zealand”
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Stephen
I totally agree with you. Search vendor after search vendor filled their websites and sales teams bags with functionality without any indication of the impact it could have on the organisation. They were (and indeed still are) too frightened to indicate that the effectiveness of search depends less on the technology than it does on content quality and on the support of a search team that actually knows how to match business requirements to search functionality. The impression they create is a plug-and-play paradise. No way.
It’s not just a problem for proprietary vendors. Open-source applications may (and I emphasis may) reduce the initial investment but it still takes people to make search work, and they are not easy to find.
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I totally agree with the sentiments expressed in the post and in Martin’s comments. It takes people to make search work and that’s what we do in our little search consultancy. However, we can’t escape the fact that some platforms are more capable or usable than others, and in a smaller market like Australia we need to back some vendor platforms over others.
The choice of Exalead was largely made for us by 2 Australian clients (one online business and one Big Four consulting subsidiary) that went through extensive market evaluations for two very different search applications.
Now that we are actively supporting the tech we are delighted with the decision. And of course we take all the “cheer leading” with a pinch of salt.
Our clients want to talk solutions not functionality. And we are very clear that they need people to make those solutions work.