Vivisimo and Its New Positioning
August 19, 2010
I was poking around with Compete.com. Just for fun, I plugged in Endeca.com, dtSearch.com, Mindbreeze.com, and Vivisimo.com. Here’s the chart that Compete.com spit out. I view most usage reports as general indicators, not definitive data. But look at the top trending lines for Endeca and Vivisimo line:
What are these Vivisimo-hicans doing to scalp two competitors and challenge top-rated Endeca.com? The answer, based on my poking around, is that Vivisimo does not talk about search too much, does not use tired search jargon, or trot out search platitudes.
Vivisimo writes a combination of Latinized buzzwords and business school jargon. Here’s an example from the company’s news release “Top 10 Ways the US government Has Used Information Optimization to Save Tax Payers $300 Million.” Whoa, Nellie. In a time of de facto bankruptcy and government waste running amuck, Vivisimo is saving tax payers $300 million.
Here’s what the company says its Velocity Platform is doing:
Vivisimo, a leader in information optimization, today announced the top 10 ways its Information Optimization platform has saved taxpayers $300 million by helping the federal government become more efficient and improve national security. Over the past few years, federal agencies, including federally funded organizations, have saved hundreds of millions of dollars and improved America’s security posture by being able to quickly surf through mountains of information and pull relevant data that will allow federal employees and contractors to perform their job better and faster.
“Information optimization” is an interesting concept. It suggests that “information”–a concept not defined in the write up—can be optimized. “Optimize” to me connotes making a process as effective as possible or taking steps for me to make the most of an action such as my time at the gym. Optimizing information sounds pretty darned good, but I don’t know what it really means.
The news release continued:
Fortunately, Vivisimo’s Information Optimization Platform, provides capabilities that improve information access, re-use and collaboration across the full range of government activities. From internal knowledge portals that enhance agency performance to intelligence analysis, military operations and public-facing websites, Velocity helps government agencies fulfill their missions and deliver value to taxpayers.
Next the company explains that
Information Optimization is the process of finding insights across multiple systems and then delivering the right information to enable better business decisions that solve operating challenges and create economic value. The Velocity Platform helps organizations achieve information optimization through information connectivity and contextual intelligence that then enables organizational capabilities.
“Information” appears in this definition three times, optimization twice, and the notion of “contextual intelligence” (not defined) one time. I recall from my university days something called the “fog index”. My hunch is that this chunk of prose would tally a high fog score. Your mileage may differ.
What’s clear is that Vivisimo is selling its clustering and federated search technology in a quite different way. What’s also clear is that the people looking for information about solving “information problems” are find their way to the Vivisimo Web site. That big read line makes the other outfits’ search engine optimization strategies look less effective that Vivisimo’s interesting new approach.
Is Vivisimo radically different from what it was when it operated Clusty.com (now long gone) and processed content for some of its government clients? In my view, no. What’s different is that the management team is selling to the Federal government using jargon that is second nature to the procurement crowd.
Is there a lesson in this shift? Well, traditional search technology does not deliver the traffic that the Vivisimo jargon seems to deliver. The real test will come when hard financial data becomes available or the company gets acquired. In the meantime, other search vendors may want to study the Vivisimo vocabulary.
Do I know what the Vivisimo lingo means? Does that matter? Not in the world of Web site traffic in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 19, 2010
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