Microsoft Upgrades Test New Search Feature
September 23, 2015
It is here at last! After several years, Microsoft has finally upgrades its SharePoint and it comes with an exciting list of brand new features. That is not all Microsoft released an upgrade for; Microsoft’s new cloud hybrid search also has a beta. PC World examines the new Microsoft betas in the article, “Microsoft Tests SharePoint 2014 And Enterprise Cloud Hybrid Search.”
SharePoint, the popular collaborative content platform, is getting well deserved upgrade that will allow users to finally upload files up to ten gigabytes, a new App Launcher for easier accessibility for applications, simplified file sharing controls, and better accessibility on mobile devices. As with all Microsoft upgrades, however, it is recommended that SharePoint 2016 is not downloaded into the product environment.
The new cloud hybrid search will make it easier for users to locate files across various Office 365 programs:
“On top of the SharePoint beta, Microsoft’s new cloud hybrid search feature will allow Office 365 users who also run on-premises SharePoint servers to easily access both the files stored in their company’s servers as well as those stored in Microsoft’s cloud. This means that Microsoft Delve, which gives users an at-a-glance view of their team members’ work, can show files that are stored in a company’s servers and in Microsoft’s servers side by side.”
The new search feature will ease server’s workload for creating and maintaining search indices. Microsoft is encouraging organizations to switch to its cloud services, but it still offers products and support for on-site packages.
While the cloud offers many conveniences, such as quick access to files and for users to be able to work from any location, the search function will increase an ease of use. However, security is still a concern for many organizations that prefer to maintain on-site servers.
Whitney Grace, September 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Yammer Improvements and Changes on the Horizon
August 27, 2015
A few years ago, Yammer was an integral part of SharePoint’s marketing campaign as they sought to persuade users that they were moving toward a focus on social. With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2016, social is still important, although it feels less forced and more natural this time around. There will be changes to Yammer and Redmond Magazine covers it in their article, “Microsoft Announces Yammer Improvements To Come While Deprecating Some Yammer SharePoint Apps.”
The article says:
“Microsoft announced this week that it is working on a more team-oriented Yammer, and it will be bringing along some mobile app improvements, too. Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade social networking application that’s part of some Office 365 subscription plans. Yammer can be used as a standalone service, but it’s also used with SharePoint Server products and SharePoint Online implementations.”
To stay current on what else may change with the release of SharePoint Server 2016, stay tuned to ArnoldIT.com. Stephen E. Arnold is an expert on search and the enterprise. His dedicated SharePoint feed is a great way to stay up to date on the latest new surrounding SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
More Enterprise Search Revisionism: Omitted Companies Are the Major News
August 24, 2015
A flurry of news items hit my Overflight system in the last couple of days. Gartner, one of the expert for hire mid tier consulting firms, issued a “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search.” I am not sure if you can access the report. I had to log in to LinkedIn and work through various screens until this gem presented itself to me.
I followed the link and learned that the “Magic Quadrant for 2015” includes these firms:
The Challengers. To me a challenger means a person or thing that engages in any contest, as of skill, strength, etc.
- LucidWorks, founded in 2007
- Mindbreeze, a unit of Microsoft centric Fabasoft in Austria. The search unit fired up a decade ago
- Google, ah, dear old Google and its pricey Google Search Appliances. You can find the license fees for some devices via the GSAAdvantage service. Google has been sort of selling GSAs for a decade.
- Dassault Systems, yep, the French engineering outfit working to convert Exalead’s ageing technology into a product component solution. Exalead dates from 2000. Yikes, that makes the technology 15 years old, an aeon in technology time.
The good news is that LucidWorks has its roots in open source. The other three outfits are proprietary technology.
The second group is Niche Players. The companies in this sector are:
- Expert System. An outfit which opened its doors in 1992 and whose stock is publicly traded. The share price on August 23, 2015 was $2.13 a share
- Recommind, founded in year 2000, is a legal system whose technical approach often reminds me of Autonomy’s systems and methods. The firm was founded in 2000 and now, according to this story, has $70 million in revenue
- Squiz, which is, by golly, not an open source solution despite its origins in the 2001 P@noptic academic/research setting in Australia. Just try searching for that spelling “P@noptic.”
The third group is Visionaries which to me means “given to or characterized by fanciful, not presently workable, or unpractical ideas, views, or schemes.” The dictionary entry here also points out these clarifications: unreal, imaginary, idealistic, impractical, and unrealizable. Here are the search outfits in this category:
- BA Insight. This is an company founded in 2004. The founder raised some venture money and then found himself looking for his future elsewhere. In the presentations I have heard, BA Insight is [a] an enterprise search system replacement for whatever you have running, [b] a business intelligence system, [c] a metatagging machine, [d] some combination of these functions.,
- IBM. Ah, dear, old IBM. The company does the home grown thing with scripts and algorithms from its research labs. IBM was founded in It does the open source thing by building in 1911. The company has had a long time to figure out what to do since the STAIRS III and Web Fountain days. Now IBM search means use of open source, community supported, free Lucene. Plus, It does the acquisition thing with SPSS Clementine (remember than, gentle reader), Vivisimo, i2, and Cybertap, among other information access companies IBM has purchased. At the end of the day, I am not sure what search means because IBM has been promoting the heck out of Watson. You remember Watson. It was a TV game show winner. Watson wrote a cook book. Watson is curing cancer. Watson is doing all sorts of wonderful things. I suppose that’s why it is a visionary with 13 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
- IHS (Information Handling Service. IHS leverages technology from The Invention Machine (founded in 1992) an acquisition built to locate systems and methods from patent documents. The IHS search system is called Goldfire and positioned as an enterprise search system. IHS, according to Attivio, licenses the Fast Search & Transfer influenced UIA technology platform. IHS for me is a publishing company, but I suppose that doesn’t matter in today’s fluid world.
The final group of search vendors is labeled leaders. So what’s a leader? According to my online dictionary, a leader is a person or thing that leads. And “lead” means to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort. No, I will not refer to Ashley Madison, gentle reader. I will play this straight. The leaders are:
- Attivio, founded in 2007. It must be a leader because a “visionary” uses the Attivio technology to be a visionary. Is that self referential like articles about Google’s right to be forgotten which must be forgotten?
- Coveo, founded in 2004. This company has been, like Attivio, successful in attracting venture capital.The company once focused on Microsoft Windows as did BA Insight. Now the firm is into customer support but the mid tier consultants remember the good old days of enterprise search.
- Hewlett Packard. Ah, HP, the company wrote a check for $11 billion in 2011, promptly wrote off billions, and embarked on a much loved legal challenge to Dr. Michael Lynch and some other favored individuals. HP, like IBM, has been racking up declining revenues for five consecutive quarters and is in the process of dividing itself into two separate companies. Does this suggest that HP some challenges? Keep in mind Autonomy was founded in the mid 1990s.
- Lexmark. This is a relative newcomer to enterprise search. The company bought Brainware of trigram fame. Lexmark bought the 1980s search darling ISYS Search Software, which was founded in 1988. The company also snagged Kofax, which got into the content processing game with its acquisition of Kapow. I did hear that Lexmark is looking at some shortfalls related to search and content processing. I reported on the chopping of 500 jobs a couple of months ago. But leaders must expect some setbacks like Hewlett Packard. Perhaps Lexmark will reveal the shortfall from its “search related” endeavors. I would peg the number somewhere in the $75 to $80 million range in the last 18 months.
- Sinequa. This marketing centric, social media maven was founded in 2002. The company has some big European clients, but I am not certain that the push into the US has met with the “name in lights” success some French stakeholders expected. Sinequa is obviously a leader in search. I classify the company as a business process outfit, but the mid tier consultants are more informed than an old guy in rural Kentucky.
My view of the enterprise search sector is different.The companies in this list are oldies, a couple dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Let’s see. In Internet time, that pegs some technology as prehistoric.,
There is a notable omission too. The list of companies identified by the mid tier outfit has missed the company which has been driving a bulldozer through deals.
What company is that?
Elastic, gentle reader. This outfit is in the process of providing the folks at Goldman Sachs with some information access love. The company has shoved aside the Lucid Works outfit which is scrambling to reposition itself as a Big Data spark something. There are cloud versions of Elastic available for a darned reasonable price. Check out SearchBlox, for example. Keep in mind that Elasticsearch was a second act to Compass, another search system.
A question which I asked myself is, “Why has a mid tier outfit which is so darned expert in enterprise search overlooked the big dog?” Frankly I have no evidence other than the odd little grid in the Linked In post. I assume that the experts at the mid tier firms don’t know much about what’s happening in search. Another thought is that the Elastic folks don’t buy much third party expert input about search. Whatever the reason, I suggest you, gentle reader, become familiar with Elasticsearch in the free or for fee variant.
Another gap I noticed is the omission of the appliance folks. Right off the bat, I think Index Engines, Maxxcat, and Thunderstone deserve a tiny footnote. Maxxcat, for example, is pretty good in the enterprise content indexing arena. Buy a box and plug it in. Index Engines does a great job making some specialized content instantly accessible. And Thunderstone? Well, the company has some darned good technology.
A third lacuna is the omission of the wild and crazy, Fast Search & Transfer tinged SharePoint search. There are upwards of 150 million SharePoint installations. Like it or not, Microsoft also shoves search down my throat each time I use Windows 10. Yikes. The system may have a legacy of considerable interest, but the darned thing is out there. Maybe a teeny tiny footnote? I would suggest that the mid tier outfit identify the vendor which sells more search into Microsoft installations than any other vendor. Nope. I won’t identify this outfit. The president agreed to a Search Wizards Speak interview and then backed out. Too bad for him. No life preserver from me again.
What’s the value of this league table or grid thing from the mid tier consulting firm.
First, it allows the companies in the list to issue a news release. I have already seen references to some of the companies. This post was inspired by the junk mail Linked In shoots at me on a regular basis. There’s nothing like PR which gets a company’s name in front of a bunch of red hot prospects.
Second, the mid tier consulting firm can visit with each company. I can imagine that on those visits, the mid tier consulting firm might just mention the firm’s strategic and tactical for fee services. Hey, if I worked for a mid tier consulting firm, I would be sure to explain why retaining me was the best darned thing since sliced bread. Oh, wait. I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton before it drifted into Snowden drifts. I responded to requests; I don’t recall making sales calls. Life is different now I suppose.
Third, the mid tier reports practically force me to write blog posts. I am delighted to be spurred into action.
Fourth, how much does it cost to use these systems? Why not make a table which presents the name of the company, the search system name so that I know what IBM asserts actually performs enterprise search and what HP calls its cloud stuff with Autonomy made ever so easy? Why not states that such and such a search system begins at $X for the license fee and $Y for the on going support, upgrades, and maintenance? Why not present average hourly engineering and technical service fees? Hey, even the best of this animal shelter of disparate systems fail. Did I say crash? Did I say flame out? Did I say deliver irrelevant results? Well, often in my experience.
To wrap up, the Visionaries, the Challengers, the Leaders, and the Niche Players can output news releases. Some my try to dismiss my observations, which is just peachy keen with me. I assume that failed webmasters, thwarted academicians, and unemployed home economics majors will explain that the best of the best appear in the league table.
Present reality any way one wants. I don’t have to make this stuff work anymore. I don’t have to explain to the CFO why the costs associated with enterprise search will continue to go up until the system is removed from the company. I will no longer have to attend a conference filled with cheerleaders for a utilitarian technology which most companies have learned is pretty much the same as it has been since the days of Fulcrum and Verity.
Remember. This is 2015. Most of the technology presented in the mid tier report is getting old. The world wants mobile. The world wants predictive outputs. The world wants search which actually delivers relevant results.
Maybe that is secondary today?
Will I read the complete report if a copy becomes available to me?
Nah. Marketing stuff bores me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2015
Organizations Should Consider Office 365 Utilization
July 30, 2015
Office 365 has been a bit contentious within the community. While Microsoft touts it as a solution that gives users more of the social and mobile components they were wishing for, it has not been widely adopted. IT Web gives some reasons to consider the upgrade in its article, “Why You Should Migrate SharePoint to Office 365.”
The article says:
“Although SharePoint as a technology has matured a great deal over the years, I still see many businesses struggling with issues related to on-premises SharePoint, says Simon Hepburn, director of bSOLVe . . . You may be thinking: ‘Are things really that different using SharePoint on Office 365?’ Office 365 is constantly evolving and as I will explain, this evolution brings with it opportunities that your business should seriously consider exploring.’”
Of course the irony is that with the new SharePoint 2016 upgrade, Microsoft is giving users a promise to stand behind on-premise installations, but they are continuing to integrate and promote the Office 365 components. Only time and feedback will dictate the continued direction of the enterprise solution. In the meantime, stay tuned to Stephen E. Arnold and his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and his dedicated SharePoint feed is a one-stop-shop for all the latest news, tips, and tricks.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 30, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Jury Is Still Out on Microsoft Delve
June 11, 2015
Sometimes hailed as Pinterest for the enterprise, Microsoft Delve is a combination of search, social, and machine learning, which produces an information hub of sorts. Delve is also becoming a test subject, as enterprise experts decide whether such offerings intrude into users’ workflow, or enhance productivity. Read more in the Search Content Management article, “Microsoft Delve May Drive Demand for Office365.”
The article summarizes the issue:
“As Microsoft advances further in its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy, new offerings such as Microsoft Delve are piquing companies’ curiosity but also raising eyebrows. Many companies will have to gauge whether services like Delve can enhance worker productivity or run the risk of being overly intrusive.”
As SharePoint unveils more about its SharePoint Server 2016, more will become known about how it functions along with all of its parts, including Delve. It will be up to the users to determine how efficient the new offerings will be, and whether they help or hinder a regular workflow. Until the latest versions become available for public release, stay tuned to ArnoldIT.com for the latest news regarding SharePoint and how it may affect your organization. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and his work on SharePoint is a great go-to resource for users and managers alike.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Enterprise Search: Is Keyword Search a Lycra-Spandex Technology?
March 3, 2015
I read a series of LinkedIn posts about why search may be an enterprise application flop. To access the meanderings of those who believe search is a young Bruce Jenner, you will have to sign up for LinkedIn and then wrangle an invitation to this discussion. Hey, good luck with this access to LinkedIn thing.
Over the years, enterprise search has bulked up. The keyword indexing has been wrapped in layers of helper code. For example, search now classifies, performs work flows operations, identifies entities, supports business intelligence dashboards, delivers self service Web help, handles Big Data, and dozens of other services.
Image Source: www.sochealth.co.uk.
I have several theories about this chubbification of keyword search. Let me highlight the thoughts that I jotted down as I worked through the “flop” postings on LinkedIn.
First, keyword search is not particularly useful to some people looking for information in an organization. The employee has to know what he or she needs and the terminology to use to unlock the secrets of the index. Add some time pressure and keyword search becomes infuriating. The fix, which began when Fulcrum Technologies pitched a platform approach to search, was to make search a smaller part of a more robust information management solution. You can still buy pieces of the original 1980s Fulcrum technology from OpenText today.
Second, system users continue to perceive results list as a type of homework. The employee has to browse the results list, click on documents that may contain the needed information, scan the document, identify the factoid or paragraph needed, copy it to another document, and then repeat the process. Employees want answers. What better way to deliver those answers than a “point and click” interface? Just pick what one needs and be done with the drudgery of the keyword search.
Third, professionals working in organizations want to find information from external sources like Web pages and blogs and from internal sources such as the server containing the proposals or president’s PowerPoint presentations. Enterprise search is presented as a solution to information access needs. The licensee quickly learns that most enterprise search systems require money, engineers, and time to set up so that content from disparate sources can be presented from a single interface. Again employees grouse when videos from YouTube and from the training department are not in the search results. Some documents containing needed information are not in the search system’s index but a draft version of the document is available via a Bing or Google search.
Fourth, the enterprise search system built on keywords lacks intelligence. For many vendors the solution is to add semantic intelligence, dynamic personalization which figures out what an employee needs by observing his information behaviors, and predictive analytics which just predicts what is needed for the company, a department and an individual.
Fifth, vendors have emphasized that a smart organization must have a taxonomy, a list of words and concepts tailored to the specific organization. These terms enrich the indexing of content. To make taxonomy management easy as pie, search vendors have tossed in editorial controls for indexing, classification, and hit boosting so that certain information appears whether the employee asked for the data or not.
In short order, the enterprise search system looks quite a bit like the “Obesity Is No Laughing Matter” poster.
This state of affairs is good for consulting engineers (SharePoint search, anyone?), mid tier consulting firm pundits, failed webmasters recast as search experts, and various hangers on. The obese enterprise search system is not particularly good for the licensing organization, the employees who are asked to use the system, or for the system administrators who have to shoehorn search into their already stuffed schedule for maintaining databases, accounting systems, enterprise resource planning, and network services.
Search is morbidly obese. No diet is going to work. The fix, based on the research conducted for my new monograph CyberOSINT is that a different approach is needed. Automated collection, analysis, and outputs are the future of information access.
Keyword search is a utility and available in NGIA systems. Unlike the obese keyword search systems, NGIA information access has been engineered to deliver more integrated services to users relying on mobile devices as well as traditional desktop computers.
Obese search is no laughing matter. One cannot make a utility into an NGIA system. However, and NGIA can incorporate search as a utility function. Keep this in mind if you are embracing Microsoft SharePoint-type systems. Net net: traditional enterprise search is splitting its seams, and it is unsightly.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2015
Delve Assists Organizations with Content Curation
February 5, 2015
In a move a la Pinterest, Microsoft now has a feature in Delve to allow users to organize their cards via a new feature called “boards.” The latest eWeek article has all the details. Read more in the article, “Microsoft Office Delve Boards Help Enterprises With Content Curation.”
The article begins:
“Delve is a mobile-optimized app that automatically surfaces situationally relevant information and interactions on ‘cards,’ visual and sharable representations of documents, discussions and other content shared over the Office 365 platform. It is powered by Office Graph, content discovery and machine learning software that the company described as the ‘new Office 365 intelligence fabric’ when it first announced the technology last year.”
Delve is a way for users to view relevant but potentially buried information without having to work too hard for it. It is part of Microsoft’s latest attempts to be a little more intuitive and user friendly while still maintaining their role as the enterprise giant. Stephen E. Arnold covers the latest on Microsoft and many things search on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint feed is quite useful for those who are following the latest trends in enterprise search.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 05, 2015
Enterprise Search: Fee Versus Free
November 25, 2014
I read a pretty darned amazing article “Is Free Enterprise Search a Game Changer?” My initial reaction was, “Didn’t the game change with the failures of flagship enterprise search systems?” And “Didn’t the cost and complexity of many enterprise search deployments fuel the emergence of the free and open source information retrieval systems?”
Many proprietary vendors are struggling to generate sustainable revenues and pay back increasingly impatient stakeholders. The reality is that the proprietary enterprise search “survivors” fear meeting the fate of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Perfect Search, Siderean Software, TREX, and other proprietary vendors. These outfits went away.
Many vendors of proprietary enterprise search systems have left behind an environment in which revenues are simply not sustainable. Customers learned some painful lessons after licensing brand name enterprise search systems and discovering the reality of their costs and functionality. A happy quack to http://bit.ly/1AMHBL6 for this image of desolation.
Other vendors, faced with mounting costs and zero growth in revenues, sold their enterprise search companies. The spate of sell outs that began in the mid 2000s were stark evidence that delivering information retrieval systems to commercial and governmental organizations was difficult to make work.
Consider these milestones:
Autonomy sold to Hewlett Packard. HP promptly wrote off billions of dollars and launched a fascinating lawsuit that blamed Autonomy for the deal. HP quickly discovered that Autonomy, like other complex content processing companies, was difficult to sell, difficult to support, and difficult to turn into a billion dollar baby.
Convera, the product of Excalibur’s scanning legacy and ConQuest Software, captured some big deals in the US government and with outfits like the NBA. When the system did not perform like a circus dog, the company wound down. One upside for Convera alums was that they were able to set up a consulting firm to keep other companies from making the Convera-type mistakes. The losses were measured in the tens of millions.
Beyond Intranet Search
October 28, 2014
Apparently, there is a difference between search and knowledge management; I guess you learn something new every day. CMS Wire asks, “Intranet Search: Where Documents Go to Die or KM Enabler?” Writer Jed Cawthorne uses Coveo’s platform to illustrate ways a company can go beyond the “baked in” search functionality in an intranet content management system. He writes:
“You don’t need to stick with the ‘built in solution’ if search is important to your KM / Enterprise Information Management strategies. There are alternatives beyond the ever more standard SharePoint (even though building FAST technology into core SharePoint 2013 has improved it) or the really big (and expensive) heavy hitters like HP’s IDOL platform.
“With the growing rate at which our mountains of internal content grow ever bigger, search capabilities are a fundamental element of an intranet, and of the broader digital workplace. If you want to apply long tail principles to mountains of social content, such as discussion forums, news feeds and updates, a search engine with concept search capabilities would be a good idea, unless you have a work force which is truly at one with tagging absolutely everything with appropriate and valuable metadata … (what, you work in the Library of the Jedi Temple? Cool!).”
Cawthorne spoke to Coveo’s Diane Berry about her company’s knowledge management options. She emphasizes broad content-source connectivity, metadata enrichment through text analytics (for companies lacking Jedi librarians), and building taxonomies through entity extraction. A user-interface based on users’ needs is also key, she notes, and mobile interfaces are a part of that. So is making it easy to adjust search and analysis parameters. See the write-up for more details and some screenshots that illustrate these points.
Cynthia Murrell, October 28, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sponsors of Two Content Marketing Plays
July 27, 2014
I saw some general information about allegedly objective analyses of companies in the search and content processing sector.
The first report comes from the Gartner Group. The company has released its “magic quadrant” which maps companies by various allegedly objective methods into leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries.
The most recent analysis includes these companies:
Attivio
BA Insight
Coveo
Dassault Exalead
Exorbyte
Expert System
HP Autonomy IDOL
IBM
HIS
Lucid Works
MarkLogic
Mindbreeze
Perceptive ISYS Search
PolySpot
Recommind
Sinequa
There are several companies in the Gartner pool whose inclusion surprises me. For example, Exorbyte is primarily an eCommerce company with a very low profile in the US compared to Endeca or New Zealand based SLI Systems. Expert System is a company based in Italy. This company provides semantic software which I associated with mobile applications. IHS (International Handling Service) provides technical information and a structured search system. MarkLogic is a company with XML data management software that has landed customers in publishing and the US government. With an equally low profile is Mindbreeze, a home brew search system funded by Microsoft-centric Fabasoft. Dassault Exalead, PolySpot, and Sinequa are French companies offering what I call “information infrastructure.” Search is available, but the approach is digital information plumbing.
The IDC report, also allegedly objective, is sponsored by nine companies. These outfits are:
Attivio
Coveo
Earley & Associates
HP Autonomy IDOL
IBM
IHS
Lexalytics
Sinequa
Smartlogic
This collection of companies is also eclectic. For example, Earley & Associates does indexing training, consulting, and does not have a deep suite of enterprise software. IHS (International Handling Services) appears in the IDC report as a knowledge centric company. I think I understand the concept. Technical information in Extensible Markup Language and a mainframe-style search system allow an engineer to locate a specification or some other technical item like the SU 25. Lexalytics is a sentiment analysis company. I do not consider figuring out if a customer email is happy or sad the same as Coveo’s customer support search system. Smartlogic is interesting because the company provides tools that permit unstructured content to be indexed. Some French vendors call this process “fertilization.” I suppose that for purists, indexing might be just as good a word.
What unifies these two lists are the companies that appear in both allegedly objective studies:
Attivio
Coveo
HP
IBM
IHS (International Handling Service)
Sinequa
My hunch is that the five companies appearing in both lists are in full bore, pedal to the metal marketing mode.
Attivio and Coveo have ingested tens of millions in venture funding. At some point, investors want a return on their money. The positioning of these two companies’ technologies as search and the somewhat unclear knowledge quotient capability suggest that implicit endorsement by mid tier consulting firms will produce sales.
The appearance of HP and IBM on each list is not much of a surprise. The fact that Oracle Endeca is not in either report suggests that Oracle has other marketing fish to fry. Also, Elasticsearch, arguably the game changer in search and content processing, is not in either pool may be evidence that Elasticsearch is too busy to pursue “expert” analysts laboring in the search vineyard. On the other hand, Elasticsearch may have its hands full dealing with demands of developers, prospects, and customers.
IHS has not had a high profile in either search or content processing. The fact that International Handling Services appears signals that the company wants to market its mainframe style and XML capable system to a broader market. Sinequa appears comfortable with putting forth its infrastructure system as both search and a knowledge engine.
I have not seen the full reports from either mid tier consulting firm. My initial impression of the companies referenced in the promotional material for these recent studies is that lead generation is the hoped for outcome of inclusion.
Other observations I noted include:
- The need to generate leads and make sales is putting multi-company reports back on the marketing agenda. The revenue from these reports will be welcomed at IDC and Gartner I expect. The vendors who are on the hook for millions in venture funding are hopeful that inclusion in these reports will shake the money trees from Boston to Paris.
- The language used to differentiate and describe the companies referenced in these two studies is unlikely to clarify the differences between similar companies or make clear the similarities. From my point of view, there are few similarities among the companies referenced in the marketing collateral for the IDC and Gartner study.
- The message of the two reports appears to be “these companies are important.” My thought is that because IDC and Gartner assume their brand conveys a halo of excellence, the companies in these reports are, therefore, excellent in some way.
Net net: Enterprise search and content processing has a hurdle to get over: Search means Google. The companies in these reports have to explain why Google is not the de facto choice for enterprise search and then explain how a particular vendor’s search system is better, faster, cheaper, etc.
For me, a marketer or search “expert” can easily stretch search to various buzzwords. For some executives, customer support is not search. Customer support uses search. Sentiment analysis is not search. Sentiment analysis is a signal for marketers or call center managers. Semantics for mobile phones, indexing for SharePoint content, and search for a technical data sheet are quite different from eCommerce, business intelligence, and business process engineering.
A fruit cake is a specific type of cake. Each search and content processing system is distinct and, in my opinion, not easily fused into the calorie rich confection. A collection of systems is a lumber room stuffed with different objects that don’t have another place in a household.
The reports seem to make clear that no one in the mid tier consulting firms or the search companies knows exactly how to position, explain, and verify that content processing is the next big thing. Is it?
Maybe a Google Search Appliance is the safe choice? IBM Watson does recipes, and HP Autonomy connotes high profile corporate disputes.
Elasticsearch, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2014
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