Recently in Product Selection Category

Analysts having been projecting major consolidation in the enterprise search marketplace for a couple of years. What is interesting to me is how slowly this is evolving. For every merger or acquisition, whether small or large (acquisition of Mondosoft by SurfRay or FAST by Microsoft), other companies emerge or evolve with diverse and potentially competitive technologies (e.g. Attivio, Connotate, Expert System, EyeAlike, Truevert, Temis).

We have seen companies like Exalead, ISYS, and Vivisimo gain on former leaders. Microsoft is often listed as an industry leader because it acquired former leader FAST while companies with solid products for verticals, like Recommind in law and financial services, are often overlooked because they lack the total company revenues of a Microsoft that sells a lot more software than enterprise search.

This past week two industry news items caused me to reflect on the potential impact of announcements that, while not surprising, can upset the plans of buyers of search technology. The first was the announcement that Autonomy is planning to procure Interwoven. That Interwoven is being acquired is no surprise, since the company was being groomed for acquisition. However, this appears to be the first instance of a "search" company acquiring a "content management/document management" company. The norm has been that search companies get bought to fill a need by ECM or CMS vendors. For anyone planning to procure Interwoven because of its embedded Vivisimo Velocity for Universal search in its Worksite product, this does put a wrinkle in the fabric. What a shame because it is going to be a while before the actual impact is really known and could slow sales. The cost to buyers having to accept Autonomy's IDOL instead of Velocity could be significant. The effect could be on both licensing and deployment because Velocity has been an efficient install for most enterprises. Autonomy has got a big ramp up to shift from being a search company to becoming an ECM supplier and some will take a wait and see attitude, regardless of the Idol reputation.

The second big announcement, of course, is the departure from Microsoft of John Marcus Lervik, a co-founder of FAST and recently named Executive VP in a newly created position for Enterprise Search at Microsoft. I'm sure you'll be seeing plenty about the reasons elsewhere. However, the difficulty for those buyers who are depending on FAST's search technology to be integrated sooner rather than later in Microsoft's offerings has just been made more complicated as one of the original leaders of FAST is leaving the team.

Two years ago I commented to FAST executives about the need for vendors on a rapid growth path to make the buying, business and support experience for customers a priority, beyond technology enhancements; so, I take little consolation in seeing this turmoil. If you are a buyer, take a good hard look behind the technology to see what else you will be dealing with as you make plans to acquire software.

Let's agree that most if not all "enterprise search" is really about point solutions within large corporations. As I have written elsewhere, the "enterprise" is almost always a federation of constituencies, each with their own solutions for content applications and that includes search. If there is any place that we find truly enterprise-wide application of search, it is in small and medium organizations (SMBs). This would include professional service firms (consultancies and law firms), NGOs, many non-profits, and young R&D companies. There are plenty of niche solutions for SMBs and they are growing.

I bring this up because the latest Gartner "magic quadrant" lists Microsoft (MS) as the "leader" in enterprise search; this is the same place Gartner has positioned Fast Search & Transfer in the past. Whether this is because Fast's assets are now owned by MS or because Gartner really believes that Microsoft is the leader, I still beg to strongly differ.

I have been perplexed by the Microsoft/Fast deal since it was announced earlier this year because, although Fast has always offered a lot of search technology, I never found it to be a compelling solutions for any of my clients. Putting aside the huge upfront capital cost for licenses, the staggering amount of development work, and time to deployment there were other concerns. I sensed a questionable commitment to an on-going, sustainable, unified and consistent product vision with supporting services. I felt that any client of mine would need very deep pockets indeed to really make a solid value case for Fast. Most of my clients are already burned out on really big enterprise deployments of applications in the ERP and CRM space, and understand the wisdom of beginning with smaller value-achievable, short-term projects on which they can build.

Products that impress me as having much more "out-of-the-box" at a more reasonable cost are clearly leaders in their unique domains. They have important clients achieving a good deal of benefit at a reasonable cost, in a short period of time. They have products that can be installed, implemented and maintained internally without a large staff of administrators, and they have good reputations among their clients for responsiveness and a cohesive series of roll-outs. Several have as many or more clients than Fast ever had (if we ever know the real number). Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their respective niches, as products ready for action with a short implementation cycle (weeks or months not years).

Autonomy and Endeca continue to bring value to very large projects in large companies but are not plug-and-play solutions, by any means. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft offer search solutions of a very different type with a heavy vendor or third-party service requirement. Google Search Appliance has a much larger installed base than any of these but needs serious tuning and customization to make it suitable to enterprise needs. Take the "leadership" designation with a big grain of salt because what leads on the charts may be exactly what bogs you down. There are no generic, one-suit-fits-all enterprise search solutions including those in the "leaders" quadrant.

I have hit on intent before and our latest member of the Gilbane blog team, Fred Dalrymple has joined the theme with his entry this week. Welcome Fred! You have given me an opening for an already planned topic, how to conduct research for enterprise search tools, those that go beyond the search box. Actually, this guidance is appropriate for the selection of any technology applications.

Getting intent solidly defined is important for so many reasons, many of them relating to solving a business problem and the expected outcomes. Knowing what these are will give you the framework for isolating likely candidates, efficiently. A second critical reason for having strong intent is to stave off project scope creep. As a former vendor, and now consultant, I see this play out repeatedly as product research ensues. Weak backbones in selection team members or flimsiness of their business case leaves openings for vendors to promote additional features, which often distracts from what is really needed.

So, armed with the right skeleton, a strong framework, a core scaffolding you are ready to approach your research systematically. Four paths are open to a study team; I recommend using all of them, in overlapping passes. Discovery about products, product performance in real-world scenarios, vendor business relationships with their clients, and the user community you will be joining are all targets that need to be exploited. Discovering a user community on-line that might have expressed a potential problem with a vendor or product, should drive you back to do more research to discover potential limitations or why a user might be having a problem that they brought on through inappropriate implementation. Iteration in research for technology requires perseverance and patience. A comment on each path to research might be helpful:

• Online research - This requires creativity and the most persistence to verify and validate what you find. I am amazed at how superficially many people read any content. We may be taught that good business writing requires a clear statement in the first paragraph of what follows with a solid summary at the end, but most content does not follow "good" business writing practices. You need to read between the lines, think about what is not being said and ask yourself why, follow every link on the sites of vendors under serious consideration. Look at vendor news notes and press releases to see how much activity is going on with product advances or new installations, and read descriptions of customer implementations to see how closely those deployments match your business need. Finally, search those customer names on the Internet in conjunction with the product name. This may retrieve public content that sheds more light on user experiences.


• Professional groups - Professional organizations in which you participate are fertile ground for asking about what others in similar situations to yours are using. As you get closer to a final choice, go back to others you know personally or professionally to get answers to the direct question, "have you had any problems with this product or vendor?" and "what is the benefit of this product for you?"


• Societies and academic institutions - These organizations publish content that may have a cost associated. When you consider thousands your organization spends on a selection process (in people time), contracting, licensing, implementation and deployment, it is wise to have a budget of several hundred dollars for reports that give detailed product evaluations. Get recommendations of librarians and peers as to publications' authoritativeness.


• User and analyst blogs and industry publications - The same guidance holds for industry publications as for societies and academic publishers but you will also want to pursue blogs of users and analysts. Users are a great source of discovering tidbits about products and vendors but continue beyond what you discover to see if the comments are isolated or follow a pattern.

There is a pattern in how many small to mid-sized enterprises go about researching technology applications, one that does not serve them well. As I interact with colleagues, business affiliates and professional peers, I play into this behavior unwittingly. For example, how many times have you been on the asking or answering side of this question: "My organization is planning to procure a search system this year, what systems should we be looking at?" Too often, I make a quick judgment based on what little I know about the asker and toss out a few potential candidate vendor names.

This scenario plays out frequently and now I am uncomfortable because, as a consultant and search analyst, I know that there is a lot more I need to know before offering off-handed advice to that question. Here are some ideas for questions that you should be asking first so that, when someone like me wants more context, you have ready answers.

You first step is to survey your internal landscape and clearly document the following:

• What are the business outcomes you expect to derive from the search product, who will be using it, under what circumstances and for what purpose?


• What is the scope of the content that will be indexed for retrieval? Create a content map that explicitly illustrates: What, Where, Who, When. This means capturing what the content is in terms of document types and formats, numbers and size, and topic, and where it is being created, stored and managed. You need to know who created it, owns it, and will have access to it. Finally, it helps to document when it was created and information about retention.


• Who will be involved in product selection and evaluation, who needs to sign off at every stage of selection and procurement, who will be involved in installation and deployment, and who will maintain the system on an ongoing basis?


• What is your IT infrastructure and who controls it? If a schematic is not in place that depicts at least the portion of the computing infrastructure that will be integral to your search support, it is time to make sure one is prepared. You cannot make an informed decision about appropriate and workable search solutions without this information.


You will also be wasting the time of vendors when you seek product and licensing information if you do not have all of these issues sorted out. Much of the packaging of search products is dependent on numbers of documents or size of the corpus to be indexed, how the software will be installed, and who and how many will be accessing it. Pricing information will be vague until you have concrete content "demographics" to share with prospective vendors. You can't even establish a budget without answering the questions above, and you need a ballpark budget figure to help narrow your choices.

So, I am resolving to be more thoughtful in my responses when queried by friends and colleagues. Before answering I will be asking you for some meaningful data in advance of reeling off a list of products. It is time for you to do some preliminary research in-house before establishing the lineup of suitors. More on the next steps, next time up.

As I was developing concepts put forth in the report Enterprise Search Markets and Applications - Capitalizing on Emerging Demand I bounced around the Internet a lot to verify information I had previously noted about products listed in the vendor directory. As I did so, evidence began to emerge about the ease with which I could resurrect an earlier retrieved bit of content. It mystified me that vendors of products to aid retrieval of content would make it so difficult to find information on their own web site. One assumption of mine has been completely debunked, that vendors would use their own search product to help site visitors discover more about their products and services. It made me wonder why they would not be showcasing the full flavor of their offerings.

The report was not written to evaluate specific products but rather to give a more holistic view of how the markets for products break down and how products themselves can be categorized. In order to do the latter, it required reading about many products with which I had no hands on experience. I wanted to understand how vendors were positioning their products, what markets they felt their products are most suited to satisfy, and what search problems were best solved with their technologies. Coming up with generalizations, trends, and differentiators was one purpose for my research. When I realized how difficult it was to dig out specifics from many vendor Web sites, I moved on, probably leaving stones unturned but time was not on my side.

Now I am going back to learn more about the problem with researching search, something complained about by a number of buyers I interviewed. Vendors are not making it easy for buyers to narrow their search for search, and shame on them. This should be a "no brainer." If you are a vendor pushing a product that is easy to install, implement and deploy, there is no better way than to put it to work on your own site. On the other hand, if you have products that are more sophisticated in terms of offering complex retrieval by leveraging refined ontologies or rules, you had better take the time to make it work well for finding nuggets on a few hundred pages of your Web site.

I am going to be writing more about this because the deeper I dig, the more interesting the results. For starters, of the first 28 vendor on my list, twelve have no site search. Of those that do, several use a third-party search engine, not their own. One major vendor's search result count displayed nearly a hundred records that matched the search while also displaying the breakdown of records by category. The trouble was the category numbers totaled less than 20. Hmmm!

Perhaps the trouble in "searchland" is that no one wants to take the time to implement, deploy and maintain search to satisfy the user. I keep saying, "it's not the technology; it's the thought and skill that goes into the back room implementation." Or is it? Stay tuned.

Amidst post Gilbane San Francisco business I have been reading what everyone else has been writing about search the past couple of months. While there continues to be much speculation and gossip about the Microsoft acquisition of FAST, and which companies may soon be absorbed into larger entities, there also continues to be interesting activity among the mid-tier and start-up search vendors. Meanwhile, I advise those who aspire to acquire a search solution for "behind the firewall," don't wait for the "big players" to come up with the definitive solution to all your search needs because it will never happen. I'm in good company with other analysts who advise moving on with point search solutions for specific business needs. You will save money, and time because many of the new products are optimized for rapid deployment, in weeks or months, not years.

If you check out my new research report, Enterprise Search Markets and Applications; Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, June, 2008, you will find a directory to companies offering search solutions with choices for what Steve Arnold refers to as "beyond search." Deep test drives of many of these products can be found in his report, as well. Meanwhile, new releases of products listed, and new products both continue to be announced. ISYS, Coveo and Expert System (Cogito) have brought new offerings to market in the last month and Collexis, a relative newcomer, is drawing attention to itself by demonstrating its products at numerous meetings this year.

So, keeping reading and checking out the possibilities. While you are at it, be sure to put the Gilbane Boston Conference on your calendar for December 3 - 4. We are all busy rounding out the program right now.

I am particularly interested in hearing from those of you who have participated in the selection of a search product in the past two years, implementing or deploying a system anywhere within your own enterprise. Please consider sending me a brief proposal for a presentation at the conference. For your effort, you will get to attend all the conference sessions, as well as help the audience with the needed reality checks on what it takes to conduct a selection process and follow through with implementation. I particularly want you to share your learning experiences: the good, the frustrating, and the lessons you have accrued. Professional speaking experience is not required - we want stories. [You'll find my email on the "Contacts" page of the Gilbane site and you should also look at the speakers guidelines for additional information.]

My blog has been silent for several weeks as I wrapped up a study of the enterprise search marketplace. More information about the report will be forthcoming in the next week or so. In the meantime, the conference season is upon us with the Infonortics Search Engine conference just held in Boston, the Enterprise Search Summit in New York next week, TextAnalytics being held in Boston in mid-June and our own Gilbane San Francisco Conference being held June 18 - 20th. It is a feast for those in the market to buy or just become more familiar with the huge number of options. In my recent research on the marketplace I interviewed a number of people who had recently made a procurement of a search product. To a person there was significant pain expressed about how much time had been spent examining and rejecting options. With well over 100 search and "beyond search" products that are now commercially viable on the market, you need to find ways to winnow your choices efficiently. There is no better way to do this than to acquire publications that give you comprehensive information concentrated in one place PLUS going to conferences to:
a) To meet vendors and assess the type of business relationship you are likely to experience with them
b) Meet other users or potential users of the various technologies to learn, first hand, what their experiences have been buying and using search software

Attending conference sessions where case studies are being given by those deploying or using software is important, but discussions on the side can also be valuable. People who show up at our Gilbane Conferences are a sharing crowd and are easy to network with. As the track chairman for all the enterprise search sessions in San Francisco, I plan to hold at least one and maybe two roundtable discussions, open to anyone who wants to participate in a free flow of ideas about enterprise search. This will likely be in the location of the lunch venue - so we can pick at our food and each others' brains, simultaneously.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to showcase the themes for our search sessions in San Francisco, beginning with the Search Keynote. Last year in Boston we had a panel discussion of search executives and analysts; that was a great discussion. This June I am going to thrust Steve Arnold, author of our new publication Beyond Search, into our spotlight with a series of questions about the marketplace to discover things that he thinks buyers should be focused on over the next six months plus soliciting some thoughts on selecting appropriate technologies. He will surely add commentary on the changing vendor landscape and what it means. Once I have had a go at questioning him, the audience will have a chance to seek his guidance. This is a "not to be missed" session so please put it on your calendar - it will not be recorded.

To warm you up to Mr. Arnold's style and range of thoughts on the subject, check out this recent interview he gave to Jess Bratcher of Bratcher & Associates.

Steve Arnold's Beyond Search report is finally launched and ready for purchase. Reviewing it gave me a different perspective on how to look at the array of 83 search companies I am juggling in my upcoming report: Enterprise Search Markets and Applications. For example, technological differentiators can channel your decisions about must haves/have nots in your system selection. Steve codifies considerations and details 15 technology tips that will help you frame those considerations.

We are getting ready for the third Gilbane Conference in which "search" has been a significant part of the presentation landscape in San Francisco, June 17 - 20th.Six sessions will be filled with case studies and enlightening "how-to-do-it-better" guidance from search experts with significant "hands-on" experience in the field. I will be conducting a workshop, immediately after the conference, How to Successfully Adopt and Deploy Search. Presentations by speakers and the workshop will focus on users' experiences and guidance for evaluating, buying and implementing search. Viewing search from a usage perspective begs a different set of classification criteria for divvying up the products.

In February, Business Trends published an interview I gave them in December, Revving up Search Engines in the Enterprise. There probably isn't much new in it for those who routinely follow this topic but if you are trying to find ways to explain what it is, why and how to get started, you might find some ideas for opening the discussion with others in your business setting. The intended audience is those who don't normally wallow in search jargon. This interview pretty much covers the what, why, who, and when to jump into procuring search tools for the enterprise.

For my report, I have been very pleased with discussions I've had with a couple dozen people immersed in evaluating and implementing search for their organizations. Hearing them describe their experiences guides other ways to organize a potpourri of search products and how buyers should approach their selection. With over eighty products we have a challenge in how to parse the domain. I am segmenting the market space into multiple dimensions from the content type being targeted by "search" to the packaging models the vendors offer. When laying out a simple "ontology" of concepts surrounding the search product domain, I hope to clarify why there are so many ways of grouping the tools and products being offered. If vendors read the report to decide which buckets they belong in for marketing and buyers are able to sort out the type of product they need, the report will have achieved one positive outcome. In the meantime, read Frank Gilbane's take on the whole topic of enterprise tacked onto any group of products.

As serendipity would have it, a colleague from Boston KM Forum, Marc Solomon, just wrote a blog on a new way of thinking of the business of classifying anything, "Word Algebra." And guess who gave him the inspiration, Mr. Search himself, Steve Arnold. As a former indexer and taxonomist I appreciate this positioning of applied classification. Thinking about why we search gives us a good idea for how to parse content for consumption. Our parameters for search selection must be driven by that WHY?

May-be it is this everlasting winter of weather events, but I'm ready for some big changes across the gray landscape. Experiencing endless winter has for me become a metaphor for what I observe within some enterprises as serial adoptions of search.

As I work on my forthcoming report, Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, I am interviewing people who are deeply engaged in search technologies. They are presenting a view of search deployment and implementation that reinforces my own observations, complete with benefits and disappointments. However, search in enterprises is like recurring weather events, some big, some small but relentless in the repetitiveness of certain experiences. It seems that early adopters in the early stages of adoption often experience the euphoria of a fresh way to find stuff. Then inertia sets in as some large subset of adopters settles in to becoming routine but faithful users. The rest are like me with winter, looking for a really big change and more; the nitpicking begins as users cast their eyes to better options hyped by the media or by compatriots in other organizations with newer "bells and whistles." Ah, what fickle beasts we are, as my husband will be very quick to remind me the first hot, humid day of summer when I complain in a desultory sulk.

So, I was delighted to read this article in the New York Times, Tech's Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True, by Miguel Helft, on March 12. I particularly loved this comment from the article: "Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change, said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world in which only early adopters got to choose, we'd all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo." It helps to put one's quest for the next big thing into perspective.

It included another quote from David Gans who, from the community of the Well in which people communicate using text-only systems, "Just because you have a nuclear-powered thing that can dry your clothes in five minutes doesn't mean there isn't value to hanging your clothes in the backyard and talking to your neighbors while doing it." As one who has never owned a clothes drier, this validated one of my own conscious decisions.

Seriously though, given all the comments collected from my interviews and my own experiences, it is really time to remind adopters, early and late, to give thought to appropriateness, what benefits us or adversely distracts us in the technologies we implement in our working worlds. (I'll leave your personal technology use for you to sort out.) Taking time to think about your intentions and "what comes next" after getting that "must have" new search system is something only you can control. Nobody on the selling side of a bakery will ever remind you that you don't really neeeed another cookie.

And in one more point, if you are in the market for search+, Steve Arnold does a fine job of positioning the appropriateness of each of the 24 systems he reviews in Beyond Search. It might just help you resist the superfluous and take a look some other options instead.

I sat in on a demonstration for an enterprise search engine this week. There were several things that really impressed me. First it was not canned; although the demonstrators were clearly following a script, and members of the audience members were asking questions throughout the demonstration. The audience was a mix of consultants and prospective customers; they had a lot of questions, asked to be shown features, functions and “what ifs.” The person demonstrating was very soon off script and doing nothing more than answering questions and demonstrating completely ad hoc searches and with excellent results.

The second impressive aspect was that the entire corpus of content was company information for the vendor. It was not everything they have on their intranet for this public view but enough to see that this is a company that actually uses its own technology throughout the enterprise for all of its divisions. Content from Lotus Notes, SharePoint, Documentum, an employee gallery, emails and files were all there and presented in a clear format for the audience to see and understand.

Finally, what impressed me was the extent to which their content reflected how their search engine was being used as a platform for doing business and working collaboratively, internally. This caused me to reflect back to a presentation for an analyst group earlier in this year by another search company. That company was rolling out a number of features in the business intelligence (BI) space. So, I asked them a couple of questions, “How are you using these tools to manage your own enterprise, doing business intelligence? How are you exploiting internal content to understand the dynamics of a rapidly growing company?" There was a long silence but the answer was along the lines of, we aren’t but we should probably consider it and it takes time to think through a strategy for deploying a good BI solution.

In my experience, if everyone in a company with an enterprise search technology product does not find a use for and evolve with its own offerings, then there is a missed opportunity and a flawed business strategy. This missed opportunity is the terrific feedback the developers will get from that internal use and the evangelism that can come from enthusiastic employees. The flawed business strategy is the huge disconnect that develops between customers and suppliers when supplier employees just never have a customer experience themselves. Search and BI are two functions that every company can benefit from using; why on earth wouldn’t every search vendor be aggressively seeking opportunities to apply its own tools.

So, buyers be aware – look for evidence that the purveyors of search actually have their own experiences to talk about and demonstrate. That can tell you a whole lot about how you will be treated as a customer because they are one, too.