Search Vendors Under Pressure: Welcome to 2016
December 21, 2015
I read ”Silicon Valley’s Cash Party Is Coming to an End.” What took so long? I suppose reality is less fun than fantasy. Why watch a science documentary when one can get lost in Netflix binging.
The write up reports:
Based on interviews with about two dozen venture capitalists and tech investors, 2016 is shaping up to be a year of reckoning for scores of technology start-ups that have yet to prove out their business models and equally challenging for those that raised money at unjustifiably high prices.
Forget the unicorns. There are some enterprise search outfits which have ingested millions of dollars, have convinced investors that big revenue or an HP-Autonomy scale buy out is just around the corner, and proprietary technology or consulting plus open source will produce gushers of organic revenue. Other vendors have tapped their moms, their nest eggs, and angels who believe in fairies.
I am not there is a General Leia Organa to fight Star Wars: The Revenue Battle for most vendors of search and content processing. Bummer. Despite the lack of media coverage for search and content processing vendors, the number of companies pitching information access is hefty. I track about 200 outfits, but many of these are unknown either because they don’t want to be visible or lack any substantive “newsy” magnetism.
My hunch is that this article suggests that 2016 may be different from the free money era the articles suggests is ending. In 2016, my view is that many vendors will find themselves in a modest tussle with their stakeholders. I worked through some of the search and content processing companies taking cash from folks with deep pockets often filled with other people’s money. (Note that investments totals come from Crunchbase). Here’s a list of search and content processing vendors who may face stakeholder and investor pressure. The more more ingested, the greater the interest investors may have in getting a return:
- Antidot, $3 million
- Attensity, $90 million
- Attivio, $71 million
- BA Insight, $14 million
- Connotate, $12 million
- Coveo, $69 million
- Digital Reasoning, $28 million
- Elastic (formerly Elasticsearch), $104 million
- Lucidworks, $53 million
- MarkLogic, $175 million
- Perfect Search, $4 million
- Palantir, $1.7 billion
- Recommind, $22 million
- Sinequa, $5 million
- Sophia Ambiance, $5 million
- X1, $12 million.
Then there are the acquired search systems which been acquired. One assumes these deals will have to produce sustainable revenues in some form:
- Hewlett Packard with Autonomy
- IBM with Vivisimo
- Dassault Systèmes with Exalead
- Lexmark with Brainware and ISYS Search
- Microsoft with Fast Search
- OpenText with BASIS, BRS, Fulcrum, and Nstein
- Oracle with Endeca, InQuira, and Rightnow
- Thomson Reuters with Solcara
Are there sufficient prospects to generate deals large enough to keep these outfits afloat?
There are search and content processing vendors competing for sales with free and open source options and the vendors with proprietary software:
- Ami Albert
- Content Analyst
- Concept Searching
- dtSearch
- EasyAsk
- Exorbyte
- Fabasoft Mindbreeze
- Funnelback
- IHS Goldfire
- SLI Systems
- Smartlogic
- Sprylogics
- SurfRay
- Thunderstone
- WCC Elise
- Zaizi
These search vendors plus many smaller outfits like Intrafind and Srch2 have to find a way to close deals to avoid the fate of Arikus, Convera, Delphes, Dieselpoint, Entopia, Hakia, Kartoo, NuTech Search, and Siderean Software, among others.
Despite the lack of coverage from mid tier consultants and the “real” journalists, the information access sector is moving along. In fact, when one looks at the software options, search and content processing vendors are easily found.
The problem for 2016 will be making sales, generating sustainable revenues, and paying back stakeholders. For many of these companies, the new year will be one which sees a number of outfits going dark. A few will thrive.
Darned exciting times in findability.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2015
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2 Responses to “Search Vendors Under Pressure: Welcome to 2016”
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Hi Stephen,
Just have a look on http://www.fluidtopics.com, you’ll understand how a company like Antidot can leverage its search technology to provide new business solutions.
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