Content Conversion: A Subset of Connectors
October 4, 2010
There is certainly some excitement in the technical backwater of content conversion. I wrote a post for someone’s blog about the legal matter involving i2.co.uk and www.palantir.com. You can do some poking around on this issue or wait until my Information Today column on the subject becomes available.
Over the years, I have had to take content from System A and convert it to a type of content or form of content that System B could process. I wanted to call attention to two outfits who provide these services.
The first is an outfit on Long Island that we used at Ziff Communications lo those many moons ago. The company is called Data Conversion Labs. I visited the firm a couple of times and sat through some demos. The take away for me was these folks can do the System A to System B work quite well. You can read about this company at
The second is an outfit one of my UK clients used. Stilo does the A to B think, and its output worked well as memory serves me. Stilo has added an on demand service, which I thought was quite nifty.
Why do I mention these two companies? I think there is a mid tier consulting firm and a search vendor suggesting that file conversion is some sort of cabal. In fact, file conversion is widely available from lots of people. The suggestion that file conversion is anything other than a widespread service, available from vendors throughout the world is just plain wrong. Marketing is one thing. Ignoring the vendors who perform conversion, code custom filters, and perform transformation on premises, via appliances, or using proprietary methods is one more example of search marketing distortion.
Ah, young people. So eager to become important and hit their numbers.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2010
Freebie
Fancy Math Maybe Not Needed?
October 2, 2010
“Search Data ‘No More Informative’ Than Standard Analysis” seems to challenge the fancy math of outfits like Recorded Future, Palantir, and IBM SPSS. How can fancy math fail to wow the researchers? The VC crowd won’t be amused. Palantir scooped up $90 million and for what?
The article asserts:
Tracking web searches worked the best in predicting how a new video game would sell, Yahoo’s Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman said.
Ah, ha. Yahoo. The purple outfit with the revolving door this week.
The Yahooligans said:
“Given the attention that search-based predictions have received recently, it may seem surprising that search data are, at least in some cases, no more informative than traditional data sources…”
One point that jumped out at me was that using third party tabulations such as a list of top tunes worked better than fancy math.
Palantir has 90 million reasons to prove Yahoo somewhat incorrect. IBM may not care. Recorded Future has the support of the Google and In-Q-Tel. Well, Yahoo may have a better way.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2010
Freebie
Connector Craziness: The Next Search Battleground
September 29, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a blog post from one of the mid tier consulting firms. The article is “Document Filters as a Search Proxy War.” I really don’t have much to say about the write up. So I will pretty much ignore it. I do this with quite a bit of blog content as I flap past 66.
However, I would like to add some information that I think those involved in search and content processing may want to have at their fingertips. I am reasonably familiar with the number of connectors available from Autonomy and Oracle. However, the connector world is not limited to two vendors, nor is it likely that most of those in search of connectors are aware that the outcome of a legal matter could – and I emphasize could – have a significant impact on the market. You can read more about this matter in my Information Today column and in a series of posts I am doing for a new Web log that will be available in mid-October. The announcement of the new Web log will appear in Beyond Search and I believe there will be a news release if I remember to alert one of my goslings to the task.
First, EntropySoft is a vendor that offers document connectors. You can get information about that firm’s offerings at www.entropysoft.net.
Second, there is a major dust up in the document connector world, and it is one that is the subject of my October Information Today column. The issue is an allegation by i2 Ltd., a company based in England. The core of the allegation is that improper actions were used to reverse engineer a document connector by Palantir. Depending on the outcome of this legal matter, there may be some modifications in the connector world. The issue is a connector for file type ANB. I have done work for i2.
Third, there are some open source connector initiatives underway. If you have not explored this side of the connector world you can begin with a Google search, a Black Duck search, or navigate to http://openconnector.org. The open source software movement, particularly in light of the Oracle litigation with Google, may have an impact on open source connectors.
There are also connector vendors in Hungary and India, but I won’t list these. When the mid tier consultants recycle my work, I want them to have something to do.
With the financial vice closing on many keyword search firms, one has to be vigilant for partial or edited information. Hiving off connectors is a way to generate cash from “must have” code widgets. A serious connector business is a relatively large undertaking. That is one reason why certain firms eschew connectors completely; others code their own with varying degrees of success; and most firms turn to third parties for a bundle that handles the most common file types.
The goose may be old, but he makes an effort to identify as many sides of an issue as possible. What we have, therefore, is a potential instability in the shift from basic search to more sophisticated information fusion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2010
Freebie, unlike information from English majors, former journalists, and the azurini of the world
Tibco: Money and Mentos
September 27, 2010
Tibco (founded and directed by MIT- and Harvard-grad Vivek Ranadive) reported strong third quarter earnings. The company also made an interesting acquisition. Tibco purchased OpenSpirit, a maker of software used in oil and gas exploration in September 2010.
The “information bus” upon which Tibco’s fame rests is used as plumbing in a number of high profile industries. These include news, financial services, and government entities.
What’s important about Tibco is that the firm, in my opinion, has been one of the leaders in real time computing and information systems. Tibco’s approach can alert, pass messages, and transform content. With a bit of work, Tibco becomes the equivalent of the nervous system of a client. Many companies assert that their technology delivers a platform. Palantir, for example, is a relative newcomer to the platform pitch. But the reality is that companies like Tibco deliver a deeper, more fundamental architectural approach.
And Tibco makes the efficacy of its architecture easy to understand. How does Tibco communicate the value of its real time architecture? Click here.
For more information about Tibco, what I call a real platform company, navigate to the firm’s Web site at www.tibco.com. When I visited Tibco’s offices a decade ago, I remember see Yahoo News chugging happily away on Tibco’s servers. Yep, Tibco is more than Mentos.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2010
Search, Commoditization, and the Vulnerable Vendors
September 27, 2010
We are starting our fall swing for clients who want to know the outlook for search and content processing in 2011. I want to select one point from our briefing and relate it to a topic that some of the azurini are missing. I am not involved with any of the mid tier consulting firms, but these firms’ information has a way of turning up in quotes that may create an impression that all is well in search engine markets.
Search vendors are under pressure—enormous pressure. And the G forces are going up. At the same time, new players enter the market; for example, the academic spin out Sophia Search. Established players have obtained fresh infusions of capital to deal with the “opportunities” that exist in specific market segments like Microsoft SharePoint.
Let me point out that low end search solutions are now essentially free. A download of Lucene/Solr, FLAX, or some variant available with a bit of poking around via Bing.com is a click away. These systems work well, but you may want to have a friendly programmer at hand to help you over any bumps. For most organizations, open source works and works well. One doesn’t have to look much farther than Netflix to see how open source works in a high demand, high profile system. For more clues about what big firms are jumping on the open source search solution, navigate to www.lucenerevolution.com and look at the line up of speakers.
Image source: http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05_04/FlattenedCarG_850x649.jpg
Open source search is flowing into market sectors where certain historical trends have created a vacuum. Open source search is not so much muscling into these market sectors as being sucked in. Nature abhors a vacuum as most people learned in high school physics. (Modern physicists have diff3ernt views, but this is a blog post about markets, not theoretical physics.)
The market that is most directly affected are those where the perceived value of commercial search systems is low or modest and where the complexity of the search problem from the point of view of the licensee is manageable. Search is very complicated, but I am talking about perception of customers, procurement teams, and developers on staff who want to solve a problem. Open source is often the choice that our research suggests bubbles up from the technical members of the organization. The MBAs think IBM. The young engineers from CalTech think open source search.
So what happens?
Open source seeps into the organization, and when it works, it gains momentum. We did not find this trend particularly surprising because it replicates the diffusion of other technologies in other industries. I recall learning that the method of making hot air popcorn evolved from a hair drier. The hair drier from a discount store worked well enough to give the engineering team the insight required to build a very large business on a commodity component.
Who gets squished in this shift?
Facebook and Google: Philosophies Collide
September 27, 2010
I listened to the Thursday, Buzz Out Loud podcast. On the show the talent explained that a certain high profile blog (Techcrunch) wrote a story about a rumored Facebook phone. The high profile blog garnered a meeting with the founder of Facebook (Wizard Zuck or Mark Zuckerberg). In that discussion, if I heard correctly as I was peddling my exercise bike at 66 year old goose pace, Mr. Zuckerberg point out something along the lines that social functions could not be added on. The idea I took away was that Facebook is built for social functions. Google was built for search or some other function.
As I thought about this, the comment highlighted what I think of as a “platform” fight.
The idea has surfaced elsewhere. I have started to write about the i2-Palantir tussle. That seems to be about lots of different technical issues, but it is really a platform fight. i2 has been one of the leaders if not the leader in data fusion and analysis for law enforcement and intelligence applications for 20 years. Keep in mind that I have done some work for the i2 folks. The Palantir outfit—stuffed with $90 million in semi-worthless US bucks—is a comparative newcomer. These two outfits are struggling to keep or get, depending on one’s point of view—control of a very esoteric market niche. Most of the azurini and mid-tier consultants steer clear of this sector. The types of baloney generated by the azurinis’ spam plants can harm people, not just get procurement teams reassigned. The i2-Palantir issue interests me because it is a platform tussle.
I think Facebook and Google are in a platform war as well.
Now keep in mind that if you are a Googler, you see the world through Google goggles. If you are a Facebook fan, you see the world through the friend lens. I am in the middle, and here’s my take on Wizard Zuck’s alleged comment about “adding” social instead of building a social platform.
First, I think the shift from Google to Facebook as a go-to resource is an important change. The reason Facebook “works” for 500 million or more people is that the information (good, bad, right, wrong, made up, crazy, or indifferent) comes from humans. If you have some relationship with that human, the information exists within a relationship context. When I run a search on Google, I have to figure out for myself whether the information is right, wrong, made up, crazy, indifferent or an advertisement. I don’t get much human help to figure out what’s what. As a result, the Google algorithmic and “secret sauce” results strike me as somewhat less useful now that there are “contextual” results and what I call “friend cues.” Your mileage may vary, but these friend cues also exist in services like Twitter and its derivatives/applications like Tweetmeme.
Second, Google is definitely in Microsoft Word feature mode. I am impressed with some of Google’s new services such as its new authentication method, which I will write about in one of my October columns. I am not too impressed with other Google innovations such as “Instant”. The ration of Word type features to useful features seems to be tilting toward the Microsoft model. I don’t use Word because it is a program that tries to do everything well and ends up becoming a wild and crazy exercise in getting text on the screen. My goodness: green lines, red lines, auto bullets, disappearing images, weird table behavior. Give me Framemaker 7.2. Facebook is a complicated system, but the basics work reasonably well even though the firm’s immature approach to information reminds me of the last group of 20 somethings I spoke with in Slovenia several months ago. Google is now at risk of letting features get in the way of functional improvements. Facebook is in refinement mode. When it comes to social, Facebook is refining social actions. When it comes to social, Google is still trying to figure it out.
Third, Google is a platform built originally to deliver Web search results in the manner of AltaVista without Hewlett Packard in my opinion. Facebook is a platform built to let those who are young at heart find old and new pals. Google has morphed search into advertising and now faces the challenge of figuring out how to go beyond Orkut, which as I write this is struggling with some crazy virus or malware. Facebook is, according to a rumor I heard, working to provide search that uses the content within the Facebook ecosystem as the spider list. Curation versus search/advertising. Which platform is better to move search forward in the social space? Google is layering on a new approach to people and content and Facebook is simply indexing a subset of content. Curated content at that.
My view is that Facebook and Google are in a platform battle. Who will win? Wizard Zuck and Xooglers who know technically what Google errors to avoid in the Facebook social environment? Googlers who are trying to keep an 11 year old platform tuned for brute force Web indexing and on the fly ad matching run by smart algorithms?
Interesting platform battle. And a big one. This may not be a Socrates-hemlock type of tussle but it is a 21st century philosophical collision.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2010
Freebie
TEMIS and Its Luxid Toolbar
September 26, 2010
A reader in Europe alerted us to the new Luxid Toolbar. TEMIS, which assets that it is the leading provider of text analytics solutions for the enterprise, offers a free LuxidBar. You can get the software from www.temis.com. According to Tagline, the TEMIS Web log:
The publicly available LuxidBar connects to a Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform hosted and maintained by TEMIS in the cloud. The platform performs a broad range of business and scientific entities extractions together with their semantic relationships.
The company say that the software “inserts smart links on the fly within the text” and “displays information analytics dynamically.”
The add in reminds us of some of the functionality available to users of the Inxight system before the company was acquired by Business Objects, which in turn was acquired by SAP.
TEMIS says, “This unique Internet browser sidebar accelerates Web page and document reading and connects users to related knowledge.” There is a stampede for this type of value adding in content processing. Other firms in the race include i2 Ltd. (which is not chasing the consumer market after 20 years of labor in this particular vineyard), Palantir (a company involved in what seems to be a tar pit related to its content refining methods technologies), JackBe (a former government centric outfit now probing the enterprise mashup market), and dozens of other companies moving from the intelligence market to the commercial market as funds in war fighting get redirected.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
Freebie
Exclusive Interview: Mats Bjore, Silobreaker
September 23, 2010
In some follow up work for the Lucene Revolution Conference, I spoke with Mats Bjore, the former blue chip consultant at the blue chip McKinsey on Tuesday, September 21, 2010. After we discussed our respective talks at the upcoming open source conference sponsored by Lucid Imagination, I asked about the Silobreaker technology. Mats explained that there were some new developments that would be discussed at the upcoming Boston conference.
If you have not used Silobreaker.com, you will want to point your browser at www.silobreaker.com. When you click on the interface, you get an instant report. You can run a more traditional query, but Silobreaker uses proprietary methods to highlight the most important stories, provide visualizations related to the story and entities mentioned, and links to related content. The public Silobreaker is a demonstration of the more robust enterprise solution available from the firm. Silobreaker is in use at a number of interesting client facilities in the US and elsewhere.
I captured our conversation using the handy Skype recorder add in. The full text of our conversation appears below.
Mi, Mats, it’s good to talk with you again. I keep hearing about Silobreaker, so you are getting quite a bit of attention in the business intelligence space. What’s new with Silobreaker in the last few months?
Yes, we are getting quite a bit of media attention. As you know, the primary objective of launching the free news search engine was to showcase our technology to enterprise users and to make them see how easily a Silobreaker solution could be tweaked to fit their domain and requirements. The Silobreaker Enterprise Software Suite (“SESS”) was successfully installed last year as the core engine for the Swedish Armed Forces new news intelligence system and we are just about to release a SaaS product online called Silobreaker Premium that is specifically aimed at business and government agency users who don’t need or want a standalone installation. We already have some US clients as pilot clients.
Silobreaker’s splash screen at www.silobreaker.com
How do you describe Silobreaker at this stage in its development?
We’ve come a long way, yet have an exciting product roadmap ahead of us. But most importantly, we have finally reached some milestones in terms of commercial robustness and viability with the platform. Silobreaker Premium will be an exciting new product in the marketplace. Also since our technology and team is highly customizable – our clients and users demands is the most important guide for our development,
What new services have you introduced that you can talk about?
As I said, Silobreaker Premium is the new product for us this year, but we also develop a lot of integrated entity and content management functions for clients that want to have integrated Intelligence analytical tools.
What new functions are available to commercial licensees?
We think Silobreaker Premium is a powerful enterprise product for professional media-monitoring, early warning, risk management, intelligence and decision support.
Available as SaaS (Software as a Service) in a single intuitive and secure user interface, you are able to define monitoring targets, trigger content aggregation, perform analyses, and display results in customized dashboards, e-mail alerts and by auto-generated reports.
What else can the system do?
Let me list a few of the functions. You can set up watch lists and collaborate with colleagues. Also, it is easy to monitor news, reports, multimedia and social media. Clients can track big movers in the news by heat tools and other analytics. A user can easily save and export findings straight into third party applications. We make it very easy to mix and match free and premium content.
What’s the pricing?
Good question for sure. Silobreaker Premium will be priced with a single monthly flat fee per enterprise to allow and encourage large user groups within an organization to use the service regardless of the number of queries, monitoring agents, dashboards, watch lists, alerts, or reports.
There has been quite a bit of “noise” about Palantir and Recorded Future? I thought Silobreaker provided similar functions. Is that correct?
That is correct. I think conceptually we are very similar in what we are trying to deliver to our customers, but there are also some noticeable differences. We crawl different databases, we use different search methodologies, and as companies we are different in size and our pricing differs. Also I believe that from an analyst perspective the Silobreaker , in its customized versions, can provide tools that encompasses the whole intelligence process to a price that enables even large organizations to deploy our systems to everyone. We believe in Silobreaking also when it comes to collaboration.
And silobreaking means what?
Most organizations have “walls” between units. Information in one silo may not be easily accessible to authorized users in other silos. So, our product is a “silobreaker.”
I like the name. My view is that pr, venture capitalists, and the name “Google” blow some technologies up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. What anchors the Silobreaker approach? Don’t give me PR talk, okay?
No problem. Our independence and our beliefs makes Silobreaker unique. We are not VC-financed and have managed to build the business through our own money and customer revenues. That may mean that things have taken a bit longer, but it shows that what we do is for real, which is far away from the many “hype today gone tomorrow” companies that we’ve seen in passing over the last few years. We also anchor all we do in a strong belief in that information overload is not evil but a reassuring consequence of freedom and innovation, but that it is the ability to refine this overload and extract benefits from it that truly create the “killer app” that everybody needs.
Let’s assume I am a busy person. I have to make decisions and I don’t have much time. What do I have to do to get a custom output from Silobreaker?
Not much. Our Premium users typically do two things to generate custom output. Firstly, they create one or several watch lists. This could be people, products, companies or anything else they are interested in – or a list of favorite publications. Such lists can then be used to make queries across all our tools and features or to customize dashboards, email alerts and reports.
What happens if a new content stream becomes available. Say, for example, the Tumblr micro-blogging service. What is required to intake that content and include its content in my results? Is there an open source component or API for Silobreaker?
We support many different types of content. At the moment we will add open sources on request which are added easily through RSS/Atom feeds or through crawling the site. As a general rule, we do not allow users to add sources themselves. Having said that, though, Premium users can add “internal content” through an upload facility, enabling them to mix internal reports and posts with external content.
I find some visualizations pretty but either confusion, meaningless, or downright misleading. What has Silobreaker done to make information for quickly apprehendable? I guess this is called the UX or user experience?
We actually believe that graphics and visualizations should play as big a role for text-mining as it does for numerical analysis. However, I agree with you that usability becomes a big issue in order to make users understand what the visualizations are showing and how they can be used for more in-depth analysis. That is something we are working on all the time, but users must also realize that keyword-based queries generating just lists of search hits can never be the way forward for search, so we hope they are open-minded and about these new ways of presenting results.
As you look ahead, what are the two or three big changes you anticipate in next generation information access?
The focus on “how many hits at what speed” feels very much like first generation features and haven’t really helped with information overload. Context, analysis, and query customizations will be the challenges for next generation algorithms and services.
How can a reader explore Silobreaker.
Silobreaker.com is free and anyone is welcome to a free trial of Silobreaker Premium. Just get in touch.
If a person wants more information, what’s the best way to get that information or contact you?
Contact us directly at sales@silobreaker.com or call or sales director Anders Kasberg at +46 (0) 8 662 3230.
See you in Boston and then in Bethesda the following week, okay.
Yes.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2010
Freebie. The last time I was in Sweden I got herring. I want a taco.
BA-Insight Lands $6 Million
September 22, 2010
According to CMS Wire, a Microsoft partner—no, fix that—“a key Microsoft partner”—has received a cash injection of $6.0 million. You will get the content management write up in the story “BA-Insight Secures US$6M Funding for Enterprise Search”. The PR Newswire story “BA-Insight’s Strong Growth in Enterprise Search Space Secures $6 Million in Series A Funding” provides a bit more detail. Note: links to PR stories often go dead, so you may have to resort to some poking around via Bing.com which usually indexes Microsoft centric stories reasonably well.
The news release said:
BA-Insight, Inc., an enterprise search software company specializing in Microsoft-based information access technology, announced today that it has secured $6 million in private equity funding led by New York-based Milestone Venture Partners. Paladin Capital Group and Osage Venture Partners also invested in the round. The New York State Common Retirement Fund participated in the financing through funds managed by Milestone Venture Partners and Paladin Capital Group.
What’s the money for? The release said:
BA-Insight will deploy the capital raised to further develop and extend its suite of enterprise search products for SharePoint Search, expand its marketing efforts and grow its sales and support services organizations. “The market for BA-Insight technologies is expanding rapidly,” explained Guy Mounier, CEO and co-founder of BA-Insight. “We have huge growth potential in U.S. government, professional services, energy and other sectors. This investment will allow us to build the organization needed to support our growth in those markets.”
BA-Insight is a vendor committed to the enterprise search market. This “sector” has been under significant pressure from lower cost Microsoft solutions such as dtSearch (Bethesda, Maryland) and open source solutions like Lucene/Solr. In fact, enterprise search is becoming commoditized.
What’s the BA-Insight difference? According to the news release:
BA-Insight’s flagship product Longitude optimizes Microsoft’s SharePoint Search, and FAST Search for SharePoint platforms. Users can find, analyze, and act on relevant information regardless of the format or where the data resides. Longitude offers out-of-the-box SharePoint Connectors to more than 20 business applications including ERP, CRM, Messaging, and ECM. Longitude also provides a state-of-the-art user experience via a rich Silverlight SharePoint document viewer.
My observations are:
- The BA-Insight play is that Microsoft will continue to encourage its top paying certified partners an opportunity to sell into the SharePoint ecosystem. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses in the wild, that’s a big ecosystem. The risk is that Microsoft could poach the juicy accounts. If BA-Insight gets traction, Microsoft might buy BA-Insight in order to fatten up its offerings. IBM has followed this strategy for several years. The key difference, in my opinion, is that IBM is using Lucene/Solr and buying value-adding technologies to boost the IBM services business. The Microsoft approach will have a unique fingerprint.
- I think that BA-Insight is “glue play”. What I mean by “glue” is that Microsoft leaves it to licensees to hook together various components to solve a problem. BA-Insight and a handful of other Microsoft centric players provide a “snap in” solution to reduce the time, cost, and hassles of getting basic functions to work as required. Fast Search is a complex beastie, and BA-Insight’s approach is to deliver a solution without the Fast cartwheels that can lead to staff turnover.
- The challenge in the market will be one of time. The recession is allegedly “over.” For organizations strapped for cash, economies will be of significant interest. In the “search and SharePoint” niche, there are quite a few competitors. These range from other Microsoft partners such as SurfRay and Fabasoft to integrators who can hook together existing pieces and parts. Companies in this consulting approach to the search business include New Idea Engineering, with whom I have worked in the past, and my son’s company, Adhere Solutions. Note: my son did not pay me to reference him. I think I bought lunch yesterday which is how the family thing works, right?
- The shift in the enterprise market that I will talk about at the ISS conference in October 2010 is that “search” is not what most users require. The need is for low latency processing of mission critical data delivered in what I call a data fusion system. Few companies offer a “platform” that ingests and makes actionable a range of data. The key players in this space include 20 year veterans like i2 in Cambridge, England, Kroll (now a unit of Altegrity), the Palantir organization (now allegedly involved in a confusing legal matter), and the lesser known but up and coming Digital Reasoning, among others. The name “BA Insight” suggests a capability in the data fusion space, but the new release’s emphasis on “enterprise search” suggests that BA-Insight is anchored in the traditional search market. Perhaps this is just a positioning issue specifically for the news release?
The big challenge is use of the money. Increasing “marketing” sometimes works and sometimes does not. In the “search space”, there is a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion. The strong interest in open source search so far has not spilled over into the SharePoint sector. I think that will happen. When it does, there will be some interest in Microsoft-centric shops. That interest will probably come from new hires and the chief financial officer’s staff. The traditional Microsoft certified professionals like their counterpart Oracle certified database professionals want to preserve the status quo.
The status quo is not such a comfortable place. Big outfits like Oracle are resorting to legal eagles to cope with open source. Microsoft has a mixed record with regard to open source. My hunch is that BA Insight will have to find a way to go viral within the SharePoint community. That will take keen mastery of social media, the sales ability of Autonomy, and the technical savvy of some serious wizards like Exalead, the repositioning touch of Vivisimo, and the market focus of Coveo. BA Insight has the opportunity to be the break out enterprise search vendor in 2010.
Will $6.0 million be enough? I don’t know the answer. The investors’ smart money thinks BA Insight has what it takes to succeed. From the grandstand in Harrod’s Creek, this race will be fun and entertaining to watch.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
Freebie
Search Industry Spot Changing: Risks and Rewards
September 20, 2010
I want to pick up a theme that has not been discussed from our angle in Harrod’s Creek. Marketers can change the language in news releases, on company blogs, and in PowerPoint pitches with a few keystrokes. For many companies, this is the preferred way to shift from one-size-fits-all search solutions described as a platform or framework into a product vendor. I don’t want to identify any specific companies, but you will be able to recognize them as these firms load up on Google AdWords, do pay-to-play presentations at traditional conferences, and output information about the new products. To see how this works, just turn off Google Instant and run the query “enterprise search”, “customer support”, or “business intelligence.” You can get some interesting clues from this exercise.
Source: http://jason-thomas.tumblr.com/
Enterprise search, as a discipline, is now undergoing the type of transformation that hit suppliers to the US auto industry last year. There is consolidation, outright failure , and downsizing for survival. The auto industry needs suppliers to make cars. But when people don’t buy the US auto makers products, dominoes fall over.
What are the options available to a company with a brand based on the notion of “enterprise search” and wild generalizations such as “all your information at your fingertips”? As it turns out, the options are essentially those of the auto suppliers to the US auto industry:
- The company can close its doors. A good example is Convera.
- The search vendor can sell out, ideally at a very high price. A good example is Fast Search & Transfer SA.
- The search vendor can focus on a specific solution; for example, indexing FAQs and other information for customer support. A good example is Open Text.
- The vendor can dissolve back into an organization and emerge with a new spin on the technology. An example is Google and its Google Search Appliance.
- The search vendor can just go quiet and chase work as a certified integrator to a giant outfit like Microsoft. Good examples are the firms who make “snap ins” for Microsoft SharePoint.
- The search vendor can grab a market’s catchphrase like “business intelligence” and say me too. The search vendor can morph into open source and go for a giant infusion of venture funding. An example is Palantir.
Now there is nothing wrong with any of these approaches. I have worked on some projects and used many of the tactics identified above as rivets in an analysis.
What I learned is that saying enterprise search technology is now a solution has an upside and downside. I want to capture my thoughts about each before they slip away from me. My motivation is the acceleration in repositioning that I have noticed in the last two weeks. Search vendors are kicking into overdrive with some interesting moves, which we will document here. We are thinking about creating a separate news service to deal with some of the non-search aspects of what we think is a key point in the evolution of search, content processing and information retrieval.
The Upside of Repositioning One-Size-Fits-All-Search
Let me run down the facets of this view point.
First, repositioning—as I said above—is easy. No major changes have to be made except for the MBA-style and Madison Avenue type explanation of what the company is doing. I see more and more focused messages. A vendor explains that a solution can deliver an on point solution to a big problem. A good example are the search vendors who are processing blogs and other social content for “meaning” that illuminates how a product or service is perceived. This is existing technology trimmed and focused on a specific body of content, specific outputs from specific inputs, and reports that a non-specialist can understand. No big surprise that search vendors are in the repositioning game as they try to pick up the scent of revenues like my neighbor’s hunting dog.
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