CIO Magazine and Its Notions of Enterprise Search
January 26, 2010
Holy Toledo, Batman! I just read “Twenty Companies to Watch in 2010”, published by CIO magazine on January 12, 2010. I don’t know the “judges”, but I do want to learn a bit more about their technical and business training. Perhaps I can learn something from them? I look at some of the same companies and I reach quite different perceptions of what’s to be watched and what’s to be ignored.
Please, read the original article because I am going to comment on just a couple of items, and I don’t want to bias you for or against the insights of the CIO team, which I am confident is a formidable one with deep experience in business and technical fields quite beyond my ken.
The CIO team has identified Google as a company to watch. Quite a shocker. Google is now operating in a geo-political sphere, disrupting business sectors far from search and online advertising, engendering concern among users about privacy, and signaling that the company’s founders are going to sell millions of shares. I may have omitted a couple of Google actions in the telecommunications and enterprise sectors, but I would agree: Google is a firm to watch. In fact, if Google had not been mentioned, I wonder if I would have been able to figure out that it is an important outfit.
The second company on the list that interested me was Endeca. I have written about Endeca’s involvement with the Newssift project that was to breathe new life into the gasping Financial Times online project. Alas, Newssift.com has been removed because I am getting a 404 error from www.newssift.com today. The CIO experts point out that Endeca is “fast becoming the Google of enterprise search for e-commerce sites.” In my modest world of interest, there is a difference between “enterprise search” and “e-commerce search” unless I have been missing something for the last three decades. In addition, Endeca “offers perhaps the friendliest way to do ad hoc BI and customer analytics.” These are also quite different disciplines, and I must admit I did not think of a single firm able to deliver each of these fronts with the same high level of excellence. Well, that just goes to show you what the addled goose does not know.
A reference in CMSWire’s “CIO Magazine Says These are the Companies to Watch in 2010” added this point to my understanding of Endeca: “Enterprise search for eCommerce websites and partnerships with SAP, Open Text and Nstein are also key.” My view of SAP is that the company is gasping for revenues and having to back peddle on certain price increases. OpenText is a roll up, and the firm’s engineers are working overtime to support multiple systems that offer similar functionality to overlapping customer segments. The OpenText approach to search is to offer a menu of options that range from Endeca to mainframe centric BRS, from structured data via BASIS to the aging Fulcrum approach. The reference to Nstein was fascinating.
I will check back with CIO in 2011 to see how these firms are doing. My hunch is that the Google will be okay. Endeca may have a steeper hill to climb.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
I bet you think someone in the magazine industry paid me to write this blog post about the companies to watch in 2010? You are wrong. This was a freebie, ignited by the insights of the CIO editorial team. In fact, the illuminative power of the information is so great that I will report the writing-for-no-money thing to NASA.
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