Enterprise Search Is a Growth Industry: No, Really
October 16, 2015
I noticed two things when we were working through the Overflight news about proprietary vendors of enterprise search systems on October 14, 2015.
First, a number of enterprise search vendors which the Overflight system monitors, are not producing substantive news. Aerotext, Dieselpoint, and even Polyspot are just three firms with no buzz in social media or in traditional public relations channels. Either these outfits are so busy that the marketers have no time to disseminate information or there is not too much to report.
Second, no proprietary enterprise search vendor is marketing search and retrieval in the way Autonomy and the now defunct Convera used to market. There were ads, news releases, and conference presentations. Now specialist vendors talk about webinars, business intelligence, Big Data, and customer support solutions. These outfits are mostly selling consulting firms. Enterprise search as a concept is not generating much buzz based on the Overflight data.
Imagine my surprise when I read “Enterprise Search Market Expanding at a 12.2% CAGR by 2019.” What a delicious counterpoint to the effective squishing of the market sector which husbanded the Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer brouhahas. These high profile enterprise search vendors found themselves mired in legal hassles. In fact, the attention given to these once high profile search vendors has made it difficult for today’s vendors to enjoy the apparent success that Autonomy and Fast Search enjoyed prior to their highly publicized challenges.
Open source search solutions have become the popular and rational solution to information access. Companies offering Lucene, Solr, and other non proprietary information access systems have made it difficult for vendors of proprietary solutions to generate Autonomy-scale revenue. The money seems to be in consulting and add ons. The Microsoft SharePoint system supports a hot house of third party components which improve the SharePoint experience. The problem is that none of the add in and component vendors are likely to reach Endeca-scale revenues.
Even IBM with its Watson play seems to be struggling to craft a sustainable, big money revenue stream. Scratch the surface of Watson and you have an open source system complemented with home brew code and technology from acquired companies.
The write up reporting the double digit comp9ound growth rate states:
According to a recent market study published by Transparency Market Research (TMR), titled “Enterprise Search Market – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2013 – 2019”, the global enterprise search market is expected to reach US$3,993.7 million by 2019, increasing from US$1,777.5 million in 2012 and expanding at a 12.2% CAGR from 2013 to 2019. Enterprise search system makes content from databases, intranets, data management systems, email, and other sources searchable. Such systems enhance the productivity and efficiency of business processes and can save as much as 30% of the time spent by employees searching information.The need to obtain relevant information quickly and the availability of technological applications to obtain it are the main factors set to drive the global enterprise search market.
TMR, like other mid tier consulting firms, will sell some reports to enterprise search vendors who need some good news about the future of the market for their products.
The write up also contains a passage which I found quite remarkable:
To capitalize on opportunities present in the European regional markets, major market players in the U.S. are tying up with European vendors to provide enterprise search solutions.
Interesting. I do not agree. I don’t see to many US outfits tying up with Antidot, Intrafind, or Sinequa and their compatriots. Folks are using Elasticsearch, but I don’t categorize these relationships as tie ups like the no cash merger between Lexalytics and its European partner.
Furthermore, we have the Overflight data and evidence that enterprise search is a utility function increasingly dominated by open source options and niche players. Where are the big brands of a decade ago: Acquired, out of business, discredited, and adorned with jargon.
The problems include sustainable revenue, the on going costs of customer support, and the appeal of open source solutions.
Transparency Market Research seems to know more than I do about enterprise search and its growth rate. That’s good. Positive. Happy.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2015
Another Categorical Affirmative: Nobody Wants to Invest in Search
October 8, 2015
Gentle readers, I read “Autonomy Poisoned the Well for Businesses Seeking VC Cash.” Keep in mind that I am capturing information which appeared in a UK publication. I find this type of essay interesting and entertaining. Will you? Beats me. One thing is certain. This topic will not be fodder for the LinkedIn discussion groups, the marketers hawking search and retrieval at conferences to several dozen fellow travelers, or in consultant reports promoting the almost unknown laborers in the information access vineyards.
Why not?
The problem with search reaches back a few years, but I will add a bit of historical commentary after I highlight what strikes me as the main point of the write up:
Nobody wants to invest in enterprise search, says startup head. Patrick White, Synata
Many enterprise search systems are a bit like the USS United States, once the slickest ocean liner in the world. The ship looks like a ship, but the effort involved in making it seaworthy is going to be project with a hefty price tag. Implementing enterprise search solutions are similar to this type of ocean-going effort.
There you go. “Nobody.” A categorical in the “category” of logic like “All men are mortal.” Remarkable because outfits like Attivio, Coveo, and Digital Reasoning, among others have received hefty injections of venture capital in recent memory.
The write up makes this interesting point:
“I think Autonomy really messed up [the space]”, and when investors hear ‘enterprise search for the cloud’ it “scares the crap out of them”, he added. “Autonomy has poisoned the well for search companies.” However, White added that Autonomy was just the most high profile example of cases that have scared off investors. “It is unfair just to blame Autonomy. Most VCs have at least one enterprise search in their portfolio. So VCs tend to be skittish about it,” he [added.
I am not sure I agree. Before there was Autonomy, there was Fulcrum Technologies. The company’s marketing literature is a fresh today as it was in the 1990s. The company was up, down, bought, and merged. The story of Fulcrum, at least up to 2009 or so is available at this link.
The hot and cold nature of search and content processing may be traced through the adventures of Convera (formerly Excalibur Technologies) and its relationships with Intel and the NBA, Delphes (a Canadian flame out), Entopia (a we can do it all), and, of course, Fast Search & Transfer.
Now Fast Search, like most old school search technology, is very much with us. For a dose of excitement one can have Search Technologies (founded by some Convera wizards) implement Fast Search (now owned by Microsoft).
Where Are the Former Big Six in Enterprise Search Vendors: 2004 and 2015
Autonomy, now owned by HP and mired in litigation over allegations of financial fraud
Convera, after struggles with Intel and NBA engagements, portions of the company were sold off. Essentially out of business. Alums are consultants.
Endeca, owned by Oracle and sold as an eCommerce and business intelligence service. Oracle gives away its own enterprise search system.
Exalead, owned by Dassault Systèmes and now marketed as a product component system. No visibility in the US.
Fast Search, owned by Microsoft and still available as a utility for SharePoint. The technology dates from the late 1990s. Brand is essentially low profiled at this time.
Verity, Autonomy purchased Verity and used its customer list for upsales and used the K2 technology as part of the sprawling IDOL suite.
Fast Search reported revenues which after an investigation and court procedure were found to be a bit enthusiastic. The founder of Fast Search was the subject of the Norwegian authorities’ attention. You can check out the news reports about the prohibition on work and the sentence handed down for the issues the authorities concluded warranted a slap on the wrist and a tap on the head.
The story of enterprise search has been efforts—sometimes Herculean—to sell information access companies. When a company sells like Vivisimo for about one year’s revenues or an estimated $20 million, there is a sense of getting that mythic task accomplished. IBM, like most of the other acquirers of search technology, try valiantly to convert a utility into something with revenue lift. As I watch the evolution of the lucky exits, my overall impression is that the purchasers realize that search is a utility function. Search can generate consulting and engineering fees, but the customers want more.
That realization leads to the wild and crazy hyper marketing for products like Hewlett Packard’s cloud version of Autonomy’s IDOL and DRE technology or IBM’s embrace of open source search and the wisdom of wrapping that core with functions.
Enterprise search, therefore, is alive and well within applications or solutions that are more directly related to something that speaks to senior managers; namely, making sales and reducing costs.
What’s the cost of making sure the controls for an enterprise search system are working and doing the job the licensee wants done?
The problem is the credit card debt load which Googlers explained quite clearly. Technology outfits, particularly information access players, need more money than it is possible for most firms to generate. This contributes to the crazy flips from search to police analysis, from looking up an entry in a data base to an assertion that customer support is enabled, hunting for an article in this blog is now real time, active business intelligence, or indexing by proper noun like White House morphs into natural language understanding of unstructured text.
Investments are flowing to firms which could be easily positioned as old school search and retrieval operations. Consider Lexmark, a former unit of IBM, and an employer of note not far from my pond filled with mine run off in Kentucky. The company, like Hewlett Packard, wants to find a way to replace its traditional business which was not working as planned as a unit of IBM. Lexmark bought Brainware, a company with patents on trigram methods and a good business for processing content related to legal matters. Lexmark is doing its best to make that into a Trump scale back office content processing business. Lexmark then bought a technology dating from the 1980s (ISYS Search Software once officed in Crow’s Nest I believe) and has made search a cornerstone of the Lexmark next generation health care money spinning machine. Oracle has a number of search properties. Most of these are unknown to Oracle DBAs; for example, Artificial Linguistics, TripleHop, InQuira’s shotgun NLP technology, etc. The point is that the “brands” have not had enough magnetism to pull revenues on a stand alone basis.
Successes measured in investment dollars is not revenue. Palantir is, in effect, a search and retrieval outfit packaged as a super stealthy smart intelligence system. Recorded Future, funded by Google and In-Q-Tel, is doing a bang up job with specialized content processing. There are, remember, search and retrieval companies.
The money in search appears to be made in these plays:
- The Fast Search model. Short cuts until an investigator puts a stop to the activities.
- Creating a company and then selling it to a larger firm with a firm conviction that it can turn search into a big time money machine
- Buying a search vendor to get its customers and opportunities to sell other enterprise software to those customers
- Creating a super technology play and going after venture funding until a convenient time arrives to cash out
- Pursue a dream for intelligent software and survive on research grants.
This list does not exhaust what is possible. There are me-too plays. There are mobile niche plays. There are apps which are thinly disguised selective dissemination of information services.
The point is that Autonomy is a member of the search and retrieval club. The company’s revenues came from two principal sources:
- Autonomy bought companies like Verity and video indexing and management vendor Virage and then sold other products to these firm’s clients and incorporated some of the acquired technology into products and services which allowed Autonomy to enter a new market. Remember Autonomy and enhanced video ads?
- Autonomy managed well. If one takes the time to speak with former Autonomy sales professionals, the message is that life was demanding. Sales professionals including partners had to produce revenue or some face time with the delightful Dr. Michael Lynch or other senior Autonomy executives was arranged.
That’s it. Upselling and intense management for revenues. Hewlett Packard was surprised at the simplicity of the Autonomy model and apparently uncomfortable with the management policies and procedures that Autonomy had been using in highly visible activities for more than a decade as a publicly traded company.
Perhaps some sources of funding will disagree with my view of Autonomy. That is definitely okay. I am retired. My house is paid for. I have no charming children in a private school or university.
The focus should be on what the method for generating revenue is. The technology is of secondary importance. When IBM uses “good enough” open source search, there is a message there, gentle reader. Why reinvent the wheel?
The trick is to ask the right questions. If one does not ask the right questions, the person doing the querying is likely to draw incorrect conclusions and make mistakes. Where does the responsibility rest? When one makes a bad decision?
The other point of interest should be making sales. Stated in different terms, the key question for a search vendor, regardless of camouflage, what problem are you solving? Then ask, “Will people pay money for this solution?”
If the search vendor cannot or will not answer these questions and provide data to be verified, the questioner runs the risk of taking the USS United States for a cruise as soon as you have refurbed the ship, made it seaworthy, and hired a crew.
The enterprise search sector is guilty of making a utility function appear to be a solution to business uncertainty. Why? To make sales. Caveat emptor.
Stephen E Arnold, October 8, 2015
Grand View Research Looks at Enterprise Search and Misses a Market Shift
January 7, 2015
Every time I write about a low-tier or mid-tier consulting firm’s reports, I get nastygrams. One outfit demanded that I publish an apology. Okay, no problem. I apologize for expressing that the research was at odds with my own work. So before I tackle Grand View Research’s $4,700 report called “Enterprise Search Market Analysis By End-Use (Government & Commercial Offices, Banking & Finance, Healthcare, Retail), By Enterprise Size (Small, Medium, Large) And Segment Forecasts To 2020,” Let me say, I am sorry. Really, really sorry.
This is a report that is about a new Fantasyland loved by the naive. The year 2020 will not be about old school search.
Image source: http://www.themeparkreview.com/parks/photo.php?pageid=116&linkid=12739
I know I am taking a risk because my new report “CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access” will be available in a very short time. The fact that I elected to abandon search as an operative term is one signal that search is a bit of a dead end. I know that there are many companies flogging fixes for SharePoint, specialized systems that “do” business intelligence, and decades old information retrieval approaches packaged as discovery or customer service solutions.
But the reality is that plugging words into a search box means that the user has to know the terminology and what he or she needs to answer a question. Then the real work begins. Working through the results list takes time. Documents have to read and pertinent passages copied and pasted in another file. Then the researcher has to figure out what is right or wrong, relevant or irrelevant. I don’t know about you, but most 20 somethings are spending more time thumb typing than old fashioned research.
What has Grand View Research figured out?
First off, the company knows it has to charge a lot of money for a report on a topic that has been beaten to death for decades. Grand View’s approach is to define “search” by some fairly broad categories; for example, small, medium and large and Government and commercial, banking and finance, healthcare, retail and “others.”
Private Investor Buys Metalogix
November 13, 2014
SharePoint support and add-ons are big business, and there is news this week of a major shakeup in the market. Permira Funds just announced their purchase of Metalogix. Read more in the CMS Wire article, “SharePoint Shakeup: Private Investor Acquires Metalogix.”
The article says:
“Metalogix spent the latter half of 2013 buying out some SharePoint technology to boost its content infrastructure software suite. Permira Funds is spending time a year later buying Metalogix. The Menlo Park, Calif. international private equity firm announced today it acquired Metalogix, known for its suite of Microsoft management platforms that include SharePoint, Exchange and Office 365 . . . Metalogix, based in Washington, DC, fattened its SharePoint suite last year, making it an attractive acquisition target.”
The news may affect some customers more than others, in terms of day-to-day operations, but many are waiting to see how the move affects the overall market. Keep an eye on enterprise specific resources like ArnoldIT.com from Stephen E. Arnold, a longtime leader in search. His SharePoint feed is a great way to stay in tune with the latest news, tips, and tricks.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 13, 2014
RAVN: SOLR Search and Autonomy Services
March 22, 2014
My Overflight system flagged news about RAVN’s enterprise search and DocAuto, a company that “makes matter-centricity, email management, IDOL management, and other content management operations flexible, seamless, and secure. I must admit I was not sure what DocAuto did. I have a fleeting recollection of learning about RAVN when I was at a very disorganized enterprise search conference in London in 2013. I don’t know if the conference was in a tizzy or whether the speakers were suffering from jet lag.
RAVN’s Web site asserts that the company delivers “the power of understanding.” I’m okay with tag lines. I am not exactly sure what “understanding” means in the RAVN context, but most outfits offering “enterprise search” use words that sound like they are full of freight. I ask questions like “What is understanding?” and chuckle as I listen to the marketer explain “understanding” to me. Most of these folks are not epistemologists, however.
RAVN’s Web site offers solutions for Big Data, the power of understanding, real time understanding, and knowledge management. I am not sure what any of these buzzwords means. I write a column for KMWorld, and, truth be told, I have absolutely no idea about the meaning of “knowledge” or, for that matter, “management.” I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton—at one time one of the world’s leading management consulting firms—and I never understood what “management” meant. I think it was a way to bill client for 20 somethings to do outsourced work. Don’t hold me to this idea because at age 70, the past grows more hazy with each passing day.
The capabilities of RAVN include a knowledge graph, enterprise search, an expert locator, sentiment, and core. I clicked on the enterprise search link and and learned:
The words explaining this diagram embraced “connecting to and unifying diverse content repositories.” I think that means “federated search. RAVN “surfaces results in meaningful ways.” I am not sure what this means. RAVN search delivers relevance ranking, “enterprise scale content security,” enterprise search “scalability,” and “performance.”
The firm offers a power of understanding approach and provides a short video explaining how I can “harness the power of understanding.” The video replaces chaos with structure. The system learns the user’s interests. RAVN puts a user ahead of the competition. RAVN handles text, audio, video, and knowledge.
This manual work is not good.
The automatic RAVN system is good.
RAVN offers a core, a knowledge graph, and SharePoint support.
The company’s services include support for Autonomy IDOL, which appears to have influenced the bold assertions about RAVN’s own search system, and SOLR. My hunch is that RAVN will provide an open source solution with some connectors and software wrappers.
I will keep my eye on RAVN search. For now, the company is in buzzword marketing mode.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2014
Better Team Project Coordination in the New Year
January 6, 2014
Lots of good things happened in the enterprise in 2013, and users are looking toward an even more productive 2014. TechRepublic is sharing their best solutions for SharePoint and other collaboration platforms in 2014 in their article, “Eight Resolutions for Better Project Team Collaboration.”
After giving several helpful suggestions, the article turns to social collaboration:
“In 2013, the integration between enterprise social networks and collaboration platforms took off. For instance, Office 365 took a few steps closer to integration with Yammer, and Huddle launched integration with tibbr. When you bring your collaboration platform together with enterprise social technologies, it can also be a subtle tool to move your organization or project team away from email inboxes.”
Stephen E. Arnold, a longtime leader in search and enterprise, often covers SharePoint through his Web service, ArnoldIT. Followers of his will notice how much attention is paid to the social aspect of SharePoint, which indicates a greater industry trend. And while SharePoint is not yet a fully functioning social platform, it is improving.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 6, 2014
Box Fills Hole for Mac Users
December 18, 2013
A number of good enterprise solutions are on the market. An organization usually decides between them based on their individual needs. For some, usage of iOS and Mac OS platforms means that SharePoint is not a viable option. CITE World expands on this idea in their article, “How Box is replacing SharePoint and custom software at Scripps Networks.”
The article explains:
“Now, people throughout the company ‘use it for exchanging everything,’ he said. ‘I use it the way I used to use SharePoint.’ Box ended up solving an additional problem for Scripps: Filling a hole that SharePoint left for Mac users. SharePoint isn’t very Mac friendly, Hurst said, which became an issue for the 35 percent of Scripps workers who are on Macs.”
Box is touted as user-friendly and enterprise ready. For those reasons, it may just give SharePoint a run for its money. Add to this the fact that Mac OS and iOS users are on the rise and Box has something that SharePoint can’t offer – agility between operating systems. Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT covers the latest in SharePoint and enterprise search. He has recently and often said that SharePoint may be in trouble, and this type of stiff competition adds to that argument.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SchemaLogic Profile Available
December 3, 2013
A new profile is available on the Xenky site today. SchemaLogic is a controlled vocabulary management system. The system combines traditional vocabulary management with an organization wide content management system specifically for indexing words and phrases. The analysis provides some insight into how a subsystem can easily boost the cost of a basic search system’s staff and infrastructure.
Taxonomy became a chrome trimmed buzzword almost a decade ago. Indexing has been around a long time, and indexing has a complete body of practices and standards for the practitioner to use when indexing content objects.
Just what an organization needs to make sense of its text, images, videos, and other digital information/data. At a commercial database publsihing company, more than a dozen people can be involved in managing a controlled term list and classification coding scheme. When a term is misapplied, finding a content object can be quite a challenge. If audio or video are misindexed, the content object may require a human to open, review, and close files until the required imnage or video can be located. Indexing is important, but many MBAs do not understand the cost of indexing until a needed content object cannot be found; for example, in a legal discovery process related to a patent matter. A happy quack to http://swissen.in/swictingsys.php for the example of a single segment of a much larger organization centric taxonomy. Consider managing a controlled term list with more than 20,000 terms and a 400 node taxononmy across a Fortune 500 company or for the information stored in your laptop computer.
Even early birds in the search and content processing sector like Fulcrum Technologies and Verity embraced controlled vocabularies. A controlled term list contains forms of words and phrases and often the classification categories into which individual documents can be tagged.
The problem was that lists of words had to be maintained. Clever poobahs and mavens created new words to describe allegedly new concepts. Scientists, engineers, and other tech types whipped up new words and phrases to help explain their insights. And humans, often loosey goosey with language, shifted meanings. For example, when I was in college a half century ago, there was a class in “discussion.” Today that class might be called “collaboration.” Software often struggles with these language realities.
What happens when “old school” search and content processing systems try to index documents?
The systems can “discover” terms and apply them. Vendors with “smart software” use a range of statistical and linguistic techniques to figure out entities, bound phrases, and concepts. Other approaches include sucking in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The combination of a “knowledgebase” like Wikipedia and other methods works reasonably well.
Perspective Search Now Part of Jive Platform
November 6, 2013
Perceptive Software is working with social collaboration firm Jive, we learn from “Perceptive Software Brings Enterprise Search App to Jive Apps Market” at PRWeb. Perceptive Search has been integrated into Jive’s platform, and is available as an app through the Jive Apps Market. The press release reports:
“The Perceptive Enterprise Search App provides companies using Jive with a powerful enterprise search tool to eliminate information silos and aggregate content across multiple repositories, including SharePoint, ECM solutions, traditional file shares, legacy Lotus Notes databases, and others. The app is fully functional right out of the box, readily indexing—and giving users access to—content across multiple repositories and scaling to accommodate spikes in volume.
“The app empowers users to explore data relationships through analytical, reporting and visualization features, giving businesses more opportunity to identify trends and drive value from their content. Such value may be realized in the form of more efficient product development, customer service, marketing and more.”
Perceptive CTO Brian Anderson notes that his company uses Jive with Perspective Search for their own employees, and reports that the app has sped up their own searches. The platform’s analysis, reporting, and visualization features remove those chores from users’ to-do lists, allowing more time to act on resulting insights, he says.
Acquired by Lexmark in 2010, Perceptive Software offers a range of process- and content-management solutions. In business since 1995, Perceptive serves clients in a wide range of industries. The company is headquartered in Shawnee, Kansas and, according to their About page, is currently hiring.
Folks at Jive Software are convinced that “social business is the future.” This is why they employ the latest technology to help clients cultivate crowdsourcing, collaboration, and customer engagement, forces they say are bound to improve the business world for both customers and workers. Founded in 2012, Jive already has five far-flung offices, including their headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Cynthia Murrell, November 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Microsoft Beefs up Yammer
October 21, 2013
Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion. The news was exciting for users who were eager for the improved social experience it would bring to SharePoint implementations. Now news is circulating that major updates are in the works. Read more in the ZDNet story, “Microsoft adds more e-mail, SharePoint integration to Yammer.”
The article begins:
“Microsoft is making good on its commitment to add more e-mail and SharePoint integration to its Yammer enterprise social-networking product. On October 15, as part of its “Working Social Tour” event in San Francisco, Microsoft execs shared more on how the Yammer roadmap is evolving.”
They go on to share that Microsoft will redesign the Yammer iPad app as well as the Windows Phone apps, improve the email user experience, and update the messaging interfaces.
Yammer takes SharePoint a little closer to relevancy when it comes to social networking capabilities. However, many users are still complaining that SharePoint does not meet expectations in its basic functions. Stephen E. Arnold, a longtime leader in the world of search and developer of ArnoldIT, is a critic of SharePoint. In a recent story, he reports that only 6% of users find their SharePoint deployments successful. It sounds like Microsoft would do well to spend less time on the bells and whistles and more time on search functionality and implementation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 21, 2013
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