Day: June 1, 2006

Our friends over at CMS Watch have released an updated version of their Enterprise Search Report. The report suggests a healthy enterprise market and covers 28 vendors. There is a free excerpt available. A few of the findings (taken from the press release) are:

– IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft continue to struggle to rationalize multiple search technologies and strategies. Oracle’s “Secure Enterprise Search 10g” product may be the most straightforward offering of the three, but it has not yet seen extensive customer testing.
– Smaller search vendors continue to exploit Microsoft’s inability to develop effective search solutions atop SharePoint. Mondosoft, Coveo, dtSearch, and others are likely to continue offering value-added capabilities after the release of Microsoft’s new search services in SharePoint 2007.
– Google’s search appliance has disrupted the market, but customer testing still often finds the appliance lacking in “tune-ability” and integration capabilities.
– Faceted or “guided” navigation capabilities originally associated with enterprise search vendor Endeca have gone from product differentiator to widespread feature. Customers can obtain faceted navigation capabilities from several low-cost search vendors. Now, the key differentiator is the extent to which a search system can successfully autogenerate a useful set of metadata “facets” with minimal customer intervention.

Steve Arnold, the main author of the report, will be leading a couple of sessions on Enterprise Search at our upcoming conference with CMS Watch in Washington DC June 13 -15. Join us there and get more details from Steve.