Xenky Search Vendor Profile: Entopia

October 15, 2013

I have posted a profile of the now offline enterprise search vendor Entopia. You can access the write up at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.

Entopia is an interesting case. The company, like Endeca and Fast Search & Transfer, had embraced the idea that information access was the DNA of an organization. With access to information and metadata, a manager could make better decisions. The marketers jumped on the bandwagon and rolled out some fancy buzzwords to surround the incredibly complex Entopia system.

The Entopia approach is, in my opinion, one that took the SAP R/3 massive reengineering of work processes and applied the notion to information. Entopia included Tacit type tracking to identify people who were centers of influence in a company, search, concepts, automatic indexing, semantics, etc.

The only problem was that the cost of implementing the system once a client had been found was high. In 2006, the company wound down. The firm is still offline, but its very ambitious explanations of what information could do inspired many other vendors.

Like Convera, Entopia described a wonderful world of information access. The problem was and still is delivering in a way that meets users’ expectations and delivers a visible, easily documented payoff to the organization buying the dream and the software.

The profiles will not be updated or maintained. I am providing the information because some students may find the explanations, diagrams, and comments of interest. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. If you want to use this for commercial purposes, please, contact me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.

Remember. I am almost 70 years old and some of the final versions of these profiles commanded hefty fees. A reader reminded me that some big outfits have taken my work and reused it, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Well, these are for your personal use.

Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2013

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