Enterprise Search: The Valiant Fight On

May 17, 2016

I read “VirtualWorks and Language Tools Announce Merger.” I ran across Language Tools several years ago. The company was working to create components for ElasticSearch’s burgeoning user base. The firm espoused natural language processing as a core technology. NLP is useful, but it imposes some computational burdens on some content processing functions. ElasticSearch works pretty well, and there are a number of companies optimizing, integrating, and creating widgets to make life with ElasticSearch better, faster, and presumably more impressive than the open source system is.

This news release highlights the fact that VirtualWorks and Language Tools have merged. The financial details are not explicit, and it appears that a company founded by a wizard from Citrix will make Language Tools’ R&D hub for the Florida-based VirtualWorks’ operation.

According to the story:

The combined organization brings together best of breed core technologies in the areas of enterprise search, data management, text analytics, discovery techniques and analytics to enable the development of new and exciting next generation applications in the business intelligence space.

VirtualWorks is or was a SharePoint centric solution. Like other search vendors, the company uses connectors to suck data into a central indexing point. Users then search the content and have access to the content without having to query separate systems.

This idea has fueled enterprise search since the days of Verity, Autonomy, Fast Search, Convera, et al. The real money today seems to be in the consulting and engineering services required to make enterprise search useful.

SharePoint is certainly widely used, and it is fraught with interesting challenges. Will the lash up of these two firms generate the type of revenue once associated with Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer?

My hunch is that enterprise search continues to be a tough market. There are functional solutions to locating information available as open source or at comparatively modest license fees. I am thinking of dtSearch and Maxxcat. Both of these work well within Microsoft centric environments.

Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Acquisition, News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.