Enterprise Search: Parkour for Venture Funded Enterprise Search Vendors
January 3, 2015
Parkour refers to the sport of jumping and climbing on man made constructions. Note that most of these “obstacles” have doors, staircases, and maybe elevators.
There are some terms that make this seemingly crazy activity sound really cool. For example, I learned whilst on vacation about the KONG. This is a suat de chat and involves “diving forward over an obstacle so that the body becomes horizontal, pushing off with the hands and tucking the legs such that the body is brought back to a vertical positio0n, ready to land.” See Parkour Terminology.
I also found this maneuver fascinating:
Kash vault This vault is a combination of two vaults; the cat pass and the dash vault. After pushing off with the hands in a cat pass, the body continues past vertical over the object until the feet are leading the body. The kash vault is then finished by pushing off the object at the end, as in a dash vault.
Here’s an image of a parkour expert doing parkour, of course:
Image source: http://parkourfreerunningblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/parkour.jpg
Now this looks like something a crazy person does: Jumping off a large concrete structure. Just my opinion, of course.
And, from my point of view, parkour is very similar to selling proprietary enterprise search and content processing solutions to commercial enterprises. The danger comes from having to pay stakeholders for the cash borrowed to keep the enterprise search company afloat. The thrill comes from the knife edge under feet: one error and some serious pain results. I suppose this focuses the mind.
As 2015 gets underway, enterprise search “experts” and vendors are gearing up to make sales. Some of the antics are beneficial to the mid tier consulting firms and publications that list the “visionaries,” the “companies that matter”, and the “leaders.” There are individual experts who conflate search with mastering Big Data or delivering the fuzzy wuzzy notion of information governance. Then there are the search vendors who wrap keyword search and classification in Dollar General wrapping paper. The idea is that keyword search is customer relationship management, analytics, and business intelligence.
For me, this is search vendor parkour, and it is okay for the tiny percentage of the population who want to jump off man-made structures. But for a person with a bit of information retrieval perspective, there are some other ways to get some exercise, remain whole, and not look absolutely crazy to an outside observer.
Here are some enterprise search realities to ponder this weekend:
First, if IBM and HP actually hit their magical billion collar goals for Watson and IDOL, how much money will be left for the hundreds and hundreds of smaller search system vendors. The answer is, “Generating billions from search is not possible, and the money available tends to be a tiny fraction of these behemoths’ projections.”
Second, why would a company pay for a commercial keyword search system when there are perfectly functional open source solutions like Elasticsearch, FLAX, and SphinxSearch?
Third, how can keyword search enriched with some clustering deliver actionable intelligence? There are companies specializing in delivering actionable intelligence. Such firms as BAE and Leidos have robust platforms that collect, analyze, and report automatically. Guessing which words unlock the treasures of an index seems somewhat old fashioned to me.
Fourth, how will the companies pouring millions upon millions into Attivio, BA Insight, Coveo, and a dozen other keyword search companies get their money back? I suppose there is the hope that Google, Microsoft, or Oracle will buy one of these firms. But that looks like a long shot. My view is that paying back the investors is going to be difficult, if not impossible.
Now these statements are sobering. One can immerse oneself in that baloney generated by the mid tier consultants (one of which Dave Schubmehls my research), the silliness generated by content management blogs about findability, and the wonkery of search engine optimization wizards.
The year 2015 will witness some significant shifts in the enterprise search landscape. In my forthcoming CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access, I explain the type of systems that are underpinning intelligence systems in the US and EC nations. I point out the specific functionalities of these next generation systems that make search a utility. Think of Mac OSX and its inclusion of Spotlight. Nice to have, for sure, but search is not OSX. My research team and I also identify some important lessons the NGIA vendors are teaching their customers. We also look ahead and identify some research areas that are likely to capture investors’ attention and yield measurable results.
Search is a utility. The fact that some brave people convert it to parkour does not change the fact that the activity itself is risky, entertaining, and useless. If I were an athlete, which I am not, I would focus on sports that generate the big bucks. Hoops. Football. Soccer. Parkour? That looks nuts from my vantage point in Harrod’s Creek.
Why not sell something the customer can see solves a problem? Crazy jumps just call attention to the last gasps of a software sector that needs life support.
Stephen E Arnold, January 3, 2015
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