BA Insight Delves into Connectors
September 12, 2014
I read “BA Insight Adds 10 New Indexing Connectors to Surface Information.” The article reports that it offers connectors for:
- SharePoint Online
- Confluence
- Salesforce.com
- Microsoft Dynamics Online
- CuadraSTAR
- Alfresco
- Scopus
- PharmaCircle
- Jive
- Box
Outside In (now Oracle) and Entropy Soft (now Salesforce) proved that connectors could be more important than the software to which folks want to connect in terms of buy out magnetism.
Is BA Insight embracing connectors as a way to accelerate its attractiveness to a potential acquirer? Will BA Insight’s play provide Microsoft Delve (when it becomes a carrier class product in a couple of years) with an easy way to support more than a handful of content types? Will Microsoft buy BA Insight? (Both companies share a vision that keyword search is not about search but about related information.)
What the move suggests to me is that BA Insight is filling in some gaps in the Delve product offering. I address the Microsoft Delve collection of functions in my forthcoming Information Today column. Connectors may be the least of Delve’s challenges. I think it would be helpful if Delve could process email attachments, a feature I understand is not supported. The packing of components around Yammer is not a revolution in search. The approach reminds me of Microsoft’s creation of SharePoint from acquired and home grown code. Do you remember
My hunch is that other Microsoft dependent services firms will “delve” into this gap as well. Me too is a time honored practice in the pond choked with search fish.
Some folks are nosing around ElasticSearch as a low cost, relatively easy solution to content aggregation. What happens if ElasticSearch community developers focus on SharePoint? Interesting question.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2014
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