Coveo Asserts Record Growth and Improved Relevance
February 12, 2015
Proprietary enterprise search is one reason DARPA has made noise about a new threat center. The idea is that cyber intelligence is a hot issue. Without repeating the information in CyberOSINT, suffice it to say that keyword search is not up to the findability tasks in today’s world. For more on the threat center integration, you may want to review “New Threat Center to Integrate Cyber Intelligence.”
In this context, I read “Coveo Announces Record Growth in 2014.” The company was founded in 2005 in Canada. The the last nine years, according to Crunchbase, the company has ingested $34.7 million from eight investors. The most recent funding round was in December 2012 when the company obtained an additional $18 million. Let’s assume the data are accurate.
In the “record growth” announcement, the company states:
Coveo today announced accelerated growth in 2014 via strong demand for its enterprise search-based applications that help employees upskill as they work, and driven in large part by its continued strategic partnerships with leading organizations such as Salesforce. The year was also marked by the best quarter in the history of the company and the 1,000th enterprise activation of its software, with new customer Sonus Networks.
The “record growth” news story omits an important data point: Financial results with numbers. Coveo is a privately held company and under no obligation to provide any hard numbers. In lieu of metrics, the story provides this interesting item: Enhanced relevance tuning. After nearly nine years in the enterprise market, I had assumed that Coveo had figured out relevance.
Coveo, like its fellow travelers in the keyword search sector Attivio and BA Insight, is recognized in different “expert” advisory firms’ lists of important companies. Also, each of these three keyword search companies are working overtime to generate revenues that enable them to generate Autonomy or Endeca scale revenues. The three keyword search vendors have to differentiate themselves as the US Department of Defense are actively seeks next generation approaches. The sunny days of Autonomy and Endeca have been hit by climate change even as they recline in the shelter of Hewlett Packard and Oracle, their new owners.
My hunch is that if the financials back up the assertions in the “record growth” story, stakeholders will be happy campers. On the other hand, if those funding traditional search systems relying on proprietary code do not see a solid payback, dreary days may be ahead.
For functional information retrieval, many large companies—including the firms developing next generation information access systems—ignore proprietary search solutions. The open source software deliver a lower cost, license fee free commodity function.
Did anyone bring umbrellas? In the hay days of enterprise search, vendors gave away bumbershoots with logos affixed. These may be needed because the search climate has changed with heavier rainfall predicted.
Stephen E Arnold, February 12, 2015
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