BA Insight: Interesting Spin for Enterprise Search
March 4, 2020
DarkCyber noted BA Insight’s blog post “Make Federation A Part Of Your Single Pane Of Glass.” What’s interesting in the write up are the assertions about enterprise search. Note that the BA Insight Web site include search along with a number of other terms, including “knowledge,” “seekers,” “connectors”, “smart hub”, and “auto classification.”
Let’s look at the assertions which attracted DarkCyber’s attention.
- “Many have considered enterprise search to be too complex.” Interesting but a number of companies have failed because what people want a search system to deliver is inherently tricky. The Google Search Appliance was “easier” to implement than a local install of Entopia, for example, but the GSA failed because meeting information needs is difficult in many cases.
- Users want a “single pane of glass.” Plus “This improved unified view will dramatically improve the search experience.” The problem remains is that information is not equal. Lawyers have to guard litigation information. Drug researchers have to keep pharma research under wraps. Human resources, what some millennials call “people” jobs have to guard employee health data, salary information, data related to hiring distributions. The “single pane of glass” is an interesting assertion, but federation is more difficult to achieve than some believe… until the services and consulting fees are tallied.
- “And, you go live quickly, instantly adding value (you don’t wait six months for crawling to complete).” The speed with which a customer can go live depends upon a number of factors; for example, dealing with security levels, processing content so that it is “findable” by a user, and latencies which creep into distributed systems. Instantly is an appealing term like new. But instantly?
Several observations:
- BA Insight is a vendor of search and retrieval services for organizations. The company has worked very hard to explain that search is more than search.
- The benefits of the BA Insight approach reads like a checklist of the types of problems which once plagued most enterprise search vendors from Autonomy and Verity. Unfortunately many of these challenges remain today.
- BA Insight has moved from its SharePoint centric approach to a wider range of platforms. T
The marketing is interesting. Data backing the assertions would be helpful.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2020
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