A Push for ISYS Search. Sorry, Lexmark. Oh, Right, Hyland
September 9, 2020
Those 1980s and enterprise search were a combo. Ian Davies’ search and retrieval system was very good. In fact, a long time ago I visited the old Crow’s Nest offices and sold a small job. After all, how many people from rural Kentucky end up in Sydney wanting to talk about search? Answer: Not too many. I wrangled an invitation because I complained about how the system displayed PDF files in a results list.
Flash forward and ISYS Search moved some operations to the US. Eventually the excitement waned and ISYS Search became a property of Lexmark. Lexington, Kentucky, had spawned a weird enterprise wide content management system which fetched a pretty price, and I assumed that Lexmark wanted its own content-centric technology. The wheels of time turned like a grindstone and Lexmark was caught between the business ends of the grist wheel. ISYS Search was now getting long in the tooth, and the company was sold to Hyland, also in the content management business. At this time, Lexmark had looped the loop from IBM to Chinese ownership.
Hence I was surprised to read “Why a Government Agency Needs Enterprise Search in the Modern World.” This was a message ISYS in the late 1980s was emitting as it marketed its system to law enforcement agencies with reasonable success. The write up by the Hyland’s Australia manager states:
Enterprise Search is becoming an essential ‘uber tool’ for content organization and discovery. More than just adding yet another layer of applications to the department’s arsenal of tools, enterprise search allows for the organized creation, indexing and retrieval of data – both structured and unstructured – through one simple interface.
In an interview with me in 2008, Ian Davies said:
What defined search back then was the significance of the need — users were after information that truly was mission critical. Now , juxtapose that with today, where search has expanded to address usability and the need to leverage corporate knowledge. What we have is a keen demand for mission critical search and retrieval, content processing, and analysis. In addition, there are large numbers of organizations that are trying to make the best use of the information in digital form. Mission-critical search manipulates information to identify a criminal, which may be a matter of public safety, or extract the key fact from information related to a legal matter. Essential search helps employees find the answer or the information needed to do their work today. Both drive the growth of ISYS. I don’t see either need diminishing going forward.
Similar? Yep.
Observations:
- Enterprise search is a challenge and shall remain so
- The lingo used to explain enterprise search is almost timeless
- The technology and its “promises” have persisted at ISYS for more than two decades.
Why hasn’t ISYS generated greater traction? Why has the core plumbing remained the same for decades? Those are important questions because they reveal much about the enterprise search sector which seems like an easy way to generate oodles of cash.
One issue is that enterprise search, like most policeware and intelware systems as well, is that the market sector is a very difficult one. One of the most popular enterprise search systems is, for instance, open source and free of license fees. That’s new. The sales pitch and arguments for paying for search are not.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2020
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4 Responses to “A Push for ISYS Search. Sorry, Lexmark. Oh, Right, Hyland”
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A Push for ISYS Search. Sorry, Lexmark. Oh, Right, Hyland : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search
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