Enterprise Search: Gritters Are Ready, Enterprise Info Highway Is Resistant
December 3, 2014
In UK talk, a gritter is a giant machine that dumps sand (grit) on a highway to make it less slippery. Enterprise search gritters are ready to dump sand on my forthcoming report about next generation information access.
The reason is that enterprise search is running on a slippery surface. The potential customers are coated in Teflon. The dust up between HP and Autonomy, the indictment of a former Fast Search & Transfer executive, and the dormancy of some high flying vendors (Dieselpoint, Hakia, Siderean Software, et al)—these are reasons why enterprise customers are looking for something that takes the company into information access realms that are beyond search. Here’s an example: “Accounting Differences, Not Fraud, Led to HP’s Autonomy Write Down.” True or false, the extensive coverage of the $11 billion deal and the subsequent billions in write down has not built confidence in the blandishments of the enterprise search vendors.
Image source: http://thehappyhousewife.com/homeschool/files/2013/01/salt-truck.jpg
Enter the gritters. Enterprise search vendors are prepping to dump no skid bits on their prospects. Among the non skid silica will be pages from mid tier consultants’ reports about fast movers and three legged rabbits. There will be conference talks that pummel the audience with assertions about the primacy of search. There will be recycled open source technology and “Fast” think packaged as business intelligence. There will be outfits that pine for the days of libraries with big budgets pitching rich metadata to trucking companies and small medical clinics who rightly ask, “What’s metadata?”
The future has shifted from search to functionality, from results lists that create work to outputs that facilitate work, from guessing keywords to unlock what’s in the index to a machine generated map that helps the user locate a pizza joint, a felon, or location for a retail store.
The enterprise search mantra has become a drone. For more than 40 years, the basic function of popping words in a search box and then slogging through results has been positioned as everything from a way to deliver self service customer support to finding a bad buy roaming the streets of Gotham City.
The under appreciated fact is that while search vendors have been hawking decades old solutions, a new breed of information access company has begun to close deals.
This new breed of cat makes use of open source technology like “good enough” Lucene. Instead of endlessly reinventing the wheel with facets in 32 flavors like ice cream, a group of about three dozen companies worldwide are in the process of making information access deliver results even a clueless senior manager can recognize.
So who are these companies? What does their software do? What functions do these new systems deliver? These questions and others will be answered in my forthcoming report “Next Generation Information Access.” If you want to reserve a copy, write benkent2020@yahoo.com and put NGIA in the subject line. The $499 report will be available to those who reserve a copy before December 31, 2014, $299.
The study contains a diagram showing why enterprise search is little more than a utility that is relegated to delivering “good enough” results. The real action has shifted. The future for NGIA firms looks bright based on our research.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2014
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