Enterprise Search and Grease Management
June 7, 2019
I see some crazy stuff. Every once in a while, a really crazy item crosses my desk. The example I wish to highlight today is called “Enterprise Search Software Market to depict huge growth, Key Methodologies, Top Players: SharePoint, IBM, Lucidworks, Microsoft FAST, Oracle, Amazon CloudSearch, Apache Lucene, Attivio.” My hunch is that rolling in Amazon and Microsoft cloud revenues will make almost any market look like Popeye the Sailor Man. The reality is that enterprise search came and went in a blaze of litigation and embarrassment. Some of the exhaust seems to be emanating from the Hewlett Packard litigation related to the former medical device maker’s acquisition of an enterprise search vendor.
Enterprise search has overpromised and under delivered for about 50 years. Elsewhere I have recounted the adventures of services which most people don’t recall or simply knew nothing about. Remember InQuire, the service with forward truncation? A more recent fumble is the disappearance of those cheerful yellow Google Search Appliances, its staff, and the marketing collateral promising an end to the misery of traditional enterprise search solutions.
The buzz has not died down at at Reports Monitor. You can read their remarkable news release at this link. Forget the incredible hyperbole of “huge growth.” Hello, Reports Monitor, one can download a perfectly good enterprise search system from open source repositories. There are low cost systems available from outfits like Funnelback. You can get a next generation system from vendors of intelware. Don’t recognize the term? Don’t worry. These vendors don’t know what enterprise search means. And there are some companies which this report does not list as players. Want these names? Sorry, that’s information for which I charge a fee. Believe me. Reports Monitor and perhaps you, gentle reader, don’t know about these companies either.
What causes me to write about a report which is a bit on the wild side? How about this passage:
Key Insights:
- Complete in-depth analysis of the Grease Management in Commercial Kitchens
- Important changes in market dynamics.
- Segmentation analysis of the market.
- Emerging segments and regional markets.
- Historical, on-going, and projected market analysis based on volume and esteem.
- Assessment of niche industry players.
- Market share analysis.
- Key strategies of major players.
Yep, grease management. Now we’re getting to the heart of slippery data and even more slippery reports about enterprise search. The report provides region-wise data. Great stuff.
News flash: Enterprise search left the dock and took on water. Some outfits torpedoed their investors, customers, and partners. Others have tried to become business intelligence, analytics, even customer service support systems. Did not work too well.
Why?
Enterprise search is not a general purpose application. Significant work is necessary to make it possible for employees to find information in what are silos or in oddball lingo. Furthermore important people like lawyers, product researchers, and big wheels like to keep their information secret. An enterprise search system has failure baked in unless it is tailored to a quite specific problem. But at that point why not buy an eDiscovery system, a lab notebook system, or a niche solution for the eager beavers in marketing?
Maybe I am too harsh on the grease management angle. That may be closer to the truth than Reports Monitor realizes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2019
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