BA Insight New Hire Likes His Job
September 17, 2014
Navigate to “My BA Insight Enterprise Search Adventure Begins.” The enthusiasm, confidence, and Super Bowl winning attitude rips off my screen. With new executive and venture funding, BA Insight seems to be a go to solution. But is the company too closely allied with Microsoft and the aging SharePoint product? Will the forthcoming Delve (a variation on the vision for Fast Search & Transfer revealed during a talk at CERN in 2007) put pressure on the SharePoint centric outfits? I just don’t know.
Here’s the passage I find interesting. I did not have one of the goslings “fix up” the capitalization errors or add links.
As I’ve been ramping up I’ve been learning a lot about their products and solutions. BA Insight use to be known as the connector company. The BA Insight Longitude Connectors can connect Microsoft SharePoint to more than 30 enterprise systems for information access and cross-platform search. They have so many connectors that allow SharePoint 2013, 2010, FAST and previous versions of SharePoint connect to a huge variety of backend systems. Here are a few examples: Documentum, eRooms, Websphere, Hummingbird, LiveLink, SAP, Siebel, Notes, Autonomy, FileNet, Connections, Opentext, SalesForce, Netdocs, SQL, Docushare, and a bunch of different legal systems… I heard they recently setup a connector for Jive and are open to building a connector for companies that need one to other systems not listed. Even with all of that, I find they don’t want to be known as simply a connector company since they really have a platform for enterprise search. The autoclassify stuff is brilliant. It helps set properties on your content based on your managed metadata and with a set of rules for both content already in SharePoint and for the content that will stay in these other systems. You really need to have good metadata so you can drill down and filter your search results quickly and easily and that’s where their rich search UI comes in providing search parts that give you the ability to drill in without needing to know boolean search. At that point it’s the smart previews that save you time. On top of the Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013, you get previews for PDF, ZIP, and a huge variety of other formats including the old office formats that you’d otherwise miss including to all of those systems I mentioned. There’s even more, but I think this is a good start for understanding a few of the top products. As an example they’ve been doing some really innovative work on hybrid search and real federation where the results are in one stream.
My question is, “Why would anyone use SharePoint when BA Insight can fill the bill as “enterprise search experts”? I think Fast Search had a good sense of what it had to do to address the limitations of its technology. The question is, “Will Microsoft want partners to siphon off revenue from the mother ship?”
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2014
Comments
One Response to “BA Insight New Hire Likes His Job”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] search solution | ba insight, Joel oleson director enterprise search strategy. joel responsible partnering ba insight’ global […]