Enterprise Search: The Floundering Fish!
October 27, 2011
I am thinking about another monograph on the topic of “enterprise search.” The subject seems to be a bit like the motion picture protagonist Jason. Every film ends with Jason apparently out of action. Then, six or nine months later, he’s back. Knives, chains, you name it.
The Landscape
The landscape of enterprise search is pretty much unchanged. I know that the folks who pulled off the billion dollar deals are different. These guys and gals have new Bimmers and maybe a private island or some other sign of wealth. But the technology of yesterday’s giants of enterprise search is pretty much unchanged. Whenever I say this, I get email from the chief technology officers at various “big name” vendors who tell me, “Our technology is constantly enhanced, refreshed, updated, revolutionized, reinvented, whatever.”
Source: http://www.goneclear.com/photos_2003.htm
The reality is that the original Big Five had and still have technology rooted in the mid to late 1990s. I provide some details in my various writings about enterprise search in the Enterprise Search Report, Beyond Search for the “old” Gilbane, Successful Enterprise Search Management, and my June 2011 The New Landscape of Search.
Former Stand Alone Champions of Search
For those of you who have forgotten, here’s a précis:
- Autonomy IDOL, Bayesian, mid 1990s via the 18th century
- Convera, shotgun marriage of “old” Excalibur and “less old” Conquest (which was a product of a former colleague of mine at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, back when it was a top tier consulting firm
- Endeca, hybrid of Yahoo directory and Inktomi with some jazzy marketing, late 1990
- Exalead. Early 2000 technology and arguably the best of this elite group of information retrieval technology firms. Exalead is now part of Dassault, the French engineering wizardry firm.
- Fast Search & Transfer, Norwegian university, late 1990s. Now part of Microsoft Corp.
- Fulcrum, now part of OpenText. Dates from the early 1990s and maybe retired. I have lost track.
- Google Search Appliance. Late 1990s technology in an appliance form. The product looks a bit like an orphan to me as Google chases the enterprise cloud. GSA was reworked because “voting” doesn’t help a person in a company find a document, but it seems to be a dead end of sorts.
- IBM Stairs III, recoded in Germany and then kept alive via the Search Manager product and the third-party BRS system, which is now part of the OpenText stable of search solutions. Dates from the mid 1970s. IBM now “loves” open source Lucene. Sort of.
- Oracle Text. Late 1980s via acquisition of Artificial Linguistics.
There are some other interesting and important systems, but these are of interest to dinosaurs like me, not the Gen X and Gen Y azure chip crowd or the “we don’t have any time” procurement teams. These systems are Inquire (supported forward and rearward truncation), Island Search (a useful on-the-fly summarizer from decades ago), and the much loved RECON and SDC Orbit engines. Ah, memories.
What’s important is that the big deals in the last couple of months have been for customers and opportunities to sell consulting and engineering services. The deals are not about search, information retrieval, findability, or information access. The purchasers will talk about the importance of these buzzwords, but in my opinion, the focus is on getting customers and selling them stuff.
Three points:
First, the big name search systems which have generated lots of money are now going to be like snow globe scenes. I just don’t see the resources required to reengineer, enhance, and beef up these systems becoming available over the long haul. The focus is on quarterly earnings, not on research which may or may not pay off in a 12 week window.
Second, most of the buyers of these “big name” search engines will follow standard operating mega-corporation procedure. The technology will be bundled, wrapped, embedded, and repurposed. Microsoft has shown how effective this approach is with its compression and positioning of the Fast Search & Transfer enterprise search system. First, the Unix and Linux support was jettisoned. Now the product is becoming a feature of SharePoint. My view is that the same path will be followed at HP and Oracle. There is a second option—orphaning. The buyer just freezes the product and tries to regain its cash outlay.
Third, the opportunity for second tier enterprise search vendors to become as successful as Autonomy ($800 million in revenue), Endeca ($150 million estimated in revenue), and Fast Search & Transfer ($65 million after the accountants figured out what was real money and what was imaginary money were done with their cursory review). I don’t think there will be another vendor able to hit the rarified heights of $65 million, $150 million, or $800 million in annual revenue from search and related systems.
New World Order for Search
Those days are over.
So what will happen? Who will be the “new” big dogs of search?
These are interesting questions, and I want to make some high level comments. I will not share my observations which I provide to my one or two for-fee clients. I know from past experience that the azure chip consultants will hop on their skateboard and have reports which purport to give their clients the “real scoop.” Oh, my goodness.
The present line up of vendors is a darned big one. Right now I track about 100 firms. These range from the “pure search” outfits like Perfect Search to the “we don’t do search, silly” outfits like JackBe. In between, there are many different positionings. Some of the marketing lingo flips these outfits from vertical to vertical and service to service within remarkable agility. Coveo is search, customer support, business intelligence, and, according to the most recent news “multi channel text analytics.” Vivisimo is into “information optimization.”
What we have then is a large number of companies which do search but express the function in a kaleidoscopic manner. Search is everything and nothing. The “nothing” part is what led me to write for Barbara Quint five years ago: “Search is dead.” When a term cannot be defined, that term is valueless. Ergo: dead.
What’s Ahead for 2012?
First, the search firms with marketing money will promote the heck out of themselves as the next big thing, the modern equivalent of the wheel and fire, and the solution to “just about anything to do with information” problem. We are heading into a marketing free fire zone. Facts are not required.
Second, the open source crowd is going to find that more and more commercial companies are using open source and then moving “beyond search”. Where this leaves the community is yet to be determined, but I think the basic key word function is a commodity, so research money is going to be put into other functions. The proliferation of wild and crazy interfaces and the downright silly use of an app to locate the temperature is going to increase and fast.
Third, the university research programs are going to find money tough to get. The general economic downturn is going to have an impact on the type of work that flows from clever outfits like Syracuse University and even lesser institutions. As a result, search and retrieval innovation is going to go where the smart folks AND the money are. The search innovations from China and France are two examples of where the azure chip crowd should be looking.
Fourth, customers are going to expect search to be low cost, free, a utility, or provided as part of a larger deal. The beauty of a “search enabled application” is that search is just there, a bit like oxygen and sunlight.
Wrap Up
Run a query for enterprise search on Topsy.com and look at the frequency histogram. Guess what? Few care. Enterprise search had its chance. The few companies that were able to make sales have cashed in. Now the next generation search vendor will have to do something different, and I don’t think that “something” will be called search.
Fish floundering frantically. There is an azure chip consultant to explain that some fish out of water may die. Insightful.
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
4 Responses to “Enterprise Search: The Floundering Fish!”
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Great post Stephen. Very timely, our team was having a discussion yesterday about the very same thing–enterprise search is in a bit of an identity crisis. I think the market has matured to the point where we are entering into a new phase for this technology, and your observation of the commoditization of search seems accurate for larger companies. Customers large and small do expect search to be a given. Yet it’s still a crucial element to businesses and customers. Does it need a rebranding? A reinvention? Or does the framework that supports the function of a site, and moreover, an entire business, become as ignored as the steel girders in any high rise?
Foundering? Convera died around 2 years ago after a long senesce. It appears that tech was acquired and reimplemented by something called Vertical Search Works: http://www.verticalsearchworks.com/archives/1632 .
Yes, search is dead… still… by all appearances. It’s information access, with semantically rooted information-integration capabilities, that’s alive and interesting.
Seth, http://twitter.com/sethgrimes
Seth Grimes,
I thought I wrote “flounder” and “ing”. I am not as good at wordsmithing as IBM, former English majors, and failed webmasters. But, unlike search, I am somewhat alive, not flounder-ing like some outfits.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2011
Karen Lynn,
Thanks, but I gave up doing anything that warrants the adjective “great” decades ago. Reserve that adjective for newly minted search experts and former English majors who are now masters of findability.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2011