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More Enterprise Search Revisionism: Omitted Companies Are the Major News

A flurry of news items hit my Overflight system in the last couple of days. Gartner, one of the expert for hire mid tier consulting firms, issued a “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search.” I am not sure if you can access the report. I had to log in to LinkedIn and work through various screens until this gem presented itself to me.

I followed the link and learned that the “Magic Quadrant for 2015” includes these firms:

The Challengers. To me a challenger means a person or thing that engages in any contest, as of skill, strength, etc.

• LucidWorks, founded in 2007
• Mindbreeze, a unit of Microsoft centric Fabasoft in Austria. The search unit fired up a decade ago
• Google, ah, dear old Google and its pricey Google Search Appliances. You can find the license fees for some devices via the GSAAdvantage service. Google has been sort of selling GSAs for a decade.
• Dassault Systems, yep, the French engineering outfit working to convert Exalead’s ageing technology into a product component solution. Exalead dates from 2000. Yikes, that makes the technology 15 years old, an aeon in technology time.

The good news is that LucidWorks has its roots in open source. The other three outfits are proprietary technology.

The second group is Niche Players. The companies in this sector are:

• Expert System. An outfit which opened its doors in 1992 and whose stock is publicly traded. The share price on August 23, 2015 was $2.13 a share
• Recommind, founded in year 2000, is a legal system whose technical approach often reminds me of Autonomy’s systems and methods. The firm was founded in 2000 and now, according to this story, has $70 million in revenue
• Squiz, which is, by golly, not an open source solution despite its origins in the 2001 P@noptic academic/research setting in Australia. Just try searching for that spelling “P@noptic.”

The third group is Visionaries which to me means “given to or characterized by fanciful, not presently workable, or unpractical ideas, views, or schemes.” The dictionary entry here also points out these clarifications: unreal, imaginary, idealistic, impractical, and unrealizable. Here are the search outfits in this category:

• BA Insight. This is an company founded in 2004. The founder raised some venture money and then found himself looking for his future elsewhere. In the presentations I have heard, BA Insight is [a] an enterprise search system replacement for whatever you have running, [b] a business intelligence system, [c] a metatagging machine, [d] some combination of these functions.,
• IBM. Ah, dear, old IBM. The company does the home grown thing with scripts and algorithms from its research labs. IBM was founded in It does the open source thing by building in 1911. The company has had a long time to figure out what to do since the STAIRS III and Web Fountain days. Now IBM search means use of open source, community supported, free Lucene. Plus, It does the acquisition thing with SPSS Clementine (remember than, gentle reader), Vivisimo, i2, and Cybertap, among other information access companies IBM has purchased. At the end of the day, I am not sure what search means because IBM has been promoting the heck out of Watson. You remember Watson. It was a TV game show winner. Watson wrote a cook book. Watson is curing cancer. Watson is doing all sorts of wonderful things. I suppose that’s why it is a visionary with 13 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
• IHS (Information Handling Service. IHS leverages technology from The Invention Machine (founded in 1992) an acquisition built to locate systems and methods from patent documents. The IHS search system is called Goldfire and positioned as an enterprise search system. IHS, according to Attivio, licenses the Fast Search & Transfer influenced UIA technology platform. IHS for me is a publishing company, but I suppose that doesn’t matter in today’s fluid world.

The final group of search vendors is labeled leaders. So what’s a leader? According to my online dictionary, a leader is a person or thing that leads. And “lead” means to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort. No, I will not refer to Ashley Madison, gentle reader. I will play this straight. The leaders are:

• Attivio, founded in 2007. It must be a leader because a “visionary” uses the Attivio technology to be a visionary. Is that self referential like articles about Google’s right to be forgotten which must be forgotten?
• Coveo, founded in 2004. This company has been, like Attivio, successful in attracting venture capital.The company once focused on Microsoft Windows as did BA Insight. Now the firm is into customer support but the mid tier consultants remember the good old days of enterprise search.
• Hewlett Packard. Ah, HP, the company wrote a check for $11 billion in 2011, promptly wrote off billions, and embarked on a much loved legal challenge to Dr. Michael Lynch and some other favored individuals. HP, like IBM, has been racking up declining revenues for five consecutive quarters and is in the process of dividing itself into two separate companies. Does this suggest that HP some challenges? Keep in mind Autonomy was founded in the mid 1990s.
• Lexmark. This is a relative newcomer to enterprise search. The company bought Brainware of trigram fame. Lexmark bought the 1980s search darling ISYS Search Software, which was founded in 1988. The company also snagged Kofax, which got into the content processing game with its acquisition of Kapow. I did hear that Lexmark is looking at some shortfalls related to search and content processing. I reported on the chopping of 500 jobs a couple of months ago. But leaders must expect some setbacks like Hewlett Packard. Perhaps Lexmark will reveal the shortfall from its “search related” endeavors. I would peg the number somewhere in the $75 to $80 million range in the last 18 months.
• Sinequa. This marketing centric, social media maven was founded in 2002. The company has some big European clients, but I am not certain that the push into the US has met with the “name in lights” success some French stakeholders expected. Sinequa is obviously a leader in search. I classify the company as a business process outfit, but the mid tier consultants are more informed than an old guy in rural Kentucky.

My view of the enterprise search sector is different.The companies in this list are oldies, a couple dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Let’s see. In Internet time, that pegs some technology as prehistoric.,

There is a notable omission too. The list of companies identified by the mid tier outfit has missed the company which has been driving a bulldozer through deals.

What company is that?

Elastic, gentle reader. This outfit is in the process of providing the folks at Goldman Sachs with some information access love. The company has shoved aside the Lucid Works outfit which is scrambling to reposition itself as a Big Data spark something. There are cloud versions of Elastic available for a darned reasonable price. Check out SearchBlox, for example. Keep in mind that Elasticsearch was a second act to Compass, another search system.

A question which I asked myself is, “Why has a mid tier outfit which is so darned expert in enterprise search overlooked the big dog?” Frankly I have no evidence other than the odd little grid in the Linked In post. I assume that the experts at the mid tier firms don’t know much about what’s happening in search. Another thought is that the Elastic folks don’t buy much third party expert input about search. Whatever the reason, I suggest you, gentle reader, become familiar with Elasticsearch in the free or for fee variant.

Another gap I noticed is the omission of the appliance folks. Right off the bat, I think Index Engines, Maxxcat, and Thunderstone deserve a tiny footnote. Maxxcat, for example, is pretty good in the enterprise content indexing arena. Buy a box and plug it in. Index Engines does a great job making some specialized content instantly accessible. And Thunderstone? Well, the company has some darned good technology.

A third lacuna is the omission of the wild and crazy, Fast Search & Transfer tinged SharePoint search. There are upwards of 150 million SharePoint installations. Like it or not, Microsoft also shoves search down my throat each time I use Windows 10. Yikes. The system may have a legacy of considerable interest, but the darned thing is out there. Maybe a teeny tiny footnote? I would suggest that the mid tier outfit identify the vendor which sells more search into Microsoft installations than any other vendor. Nope. I won’t identify this outfit. The president agreed to a Search Wizards Speak interview and then backed out. Too bad for him. No life preserver from me again.

What’s the value of this league table or grid thing from the mid tier consulting firm.

First, it allows the companies in the list to issue a news release. I have already seen references to some of the companies. This post was inspired by the junk mail Linked In shoots at me on a regular basis. There’s nothing like PR which gets a company’s name in front of a bunch of red hot prospects.

Second, the mid tier consulting firm can visit with each company. I can imagine that on those visits, the mid tier consulting firm might just mention the firm’s strategic and tactical for fee services. Hey, if I worked for a mid tier consulting firm, I would be sure to explain why retaining me was the best darned thing since sliced bread. Oh, wait. I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton before it drifted into Snowden drifts. I responded to requests; I don’t recall making sales calls. Life is different now I suppose.

Third, the mid tier reports practically force me to write blog posts. I am delighted to be spurred into action.

Fourth, how much does it cost to use these systems? Why not make a table which presents the name of the company, the search system name so that I know what IBM asserts actually performs enterprise search and what HP calls its cloud stuff with Autonomy made ever so easy? Why not states that such and such a search system begins at $X for the license fee and $Y for the on going support, upgrades, and maintenance? Why not present average hourly engineering and technical service fees? Hey, even the best of this animal shelter of disparate systems fail. Did I say crash? Did I say flame out? Did I say deliver irrelevant results? Well, often in my experience.

To wrap up, the Visionaries, the Challengers, the Leaders, and the Niche Players can output news releases. Some my try to dismiss my observations, which is just peachy keen with me. I assume that failed webmasters, thwarted academicians, and unemployed home economics majors will explain that the best of the best appear in the league table.

Present reality any way one wants. I don’t have to make this stuff work anymore. I don’t have to explain to the CFO why the costs associated with enterprise search will continue to go up until the system is removed from the company. I will no longer have to attend a conference filled with cheerleaders for a utilitarian technology which most companies have learned is pretty much the same as it has been since the days of Fulcrum and Verity.

Remember. This is 2015. Most of the technology presented in the mid tier report is getting old. The world wants mobile. The world wants predictive outputs. The world wants search which actually delivers relevant results.

Maybe that is secondary today?

Will I read the complete report if a copy becomes available to me?

Nah. Marketing stuff bores me.

Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2015

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