Entries Tagged 'Search' ↓

The combination of search, text analysis and content management is turning into one of the central memes of this blog. This wasn’t deliberate, although it’s something we’ve deliberated internally for a couple of years.

There were plenty of partnerships between search and content management vendors around, but they seemed to us to be either at the press release level, i.e. little more than marketing, or to be as a result of a small handful of one-off projects in the field.

But it turns out others within the industry were thinking about much deeper integrations even if they weren’t saying so publicly.

About a year after Stellent and FAST (both then independent, of course) announced a partnership that resulted in Stellent OEMing FAST’s engine, FAST seriously considered buying Stellent.

I’ve heard from a couple of reliable sources that this was discussed at the highest level within FAST, but it chose not to pursue the deal and instead decided to veer way off its core business and ending up distracting itself to such an extent it got itself tied up in knots. This ended with it being forced to incur about $55m in charges in 2007 that resulted in its share rice plummeting and thus ending up costing Microsoft a lot less than it would have done.

Incidentally, one of those sidebars - Ezmo - a music community site (presented to analysts in February 2007 as a “customer” of FAST, when in fact the phrase that should’ve been used was”‘wholly-owned subsidiary”) was shut down in March.

Of course Stellent went on to be acquired by Oracle in 2007 and we’ve been impressed by the way the database giant has integrated the company so far.

But FAST and Stellent could have made for an interesting combination of the ability to manage and analyze unstructured content, and who knows, FAST-Stellent might’ve been a force to be reckoned with? Now we look to see what Microsoft - something of a toe-dipper when it comes to content management and Oracle, armed with a pretty decent search engine do to prolong this meme.

Well, that’s one of those pesky search acquisitions sorted out anyway.

Microsoft and Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) will consummate (their words, not mine) the acquisition on Thursday (April 24) now that the conditions of the acquisition have been met, according to this. FAST has had the requisite number of shares tendered since February. The time since then has been spent clearing the regulatory hurdles.

I’d grown quite attached to those Oslo Stock Exchange announcements as they provided FAST-watchers like me with a a running commentary on FAST’s progress, listing each major customer win as they happened, along with a whole lot of other stuff, including last year’s major stumble.

The new chapter of Microsoft’s enterprise search business starts this week, which is good timing for us, as I’m speaking with them next week.

We’ll occasionally use this blog to discuss our own internal taxonomy work. We ask enough vendors if they eat their own dog food, as it were, so it’s only fair we turn the spotlight on ourselves occasionally.

We here at 451, like all industry analyst companies that publish research have our own issues with categorizing our reports and making them easy to find. We started in an ad-hoc fashion when we launched back in 2000 with eight broad sections and some basic metadata but without any real plan. We gradually added to the categories till we came to a point a few years ago when I realized unless we took a more coordinated approach to a taxonomy and categorizing reports across all our products and services we were heading for trouble.

So, with experience gleaned from talking to numerous vendors and users over the years I embarked on developing a single taxonomy for the whole company. Our IT team built our own taxonomy editor and another tool to sort out reconciliations between old and new taxonomies.

But until Kathleen joined in 2006 however it was still something of a side project, but she used her experience of doing a similar project at Giga to propel the project along and I’m pleased to be able to say we’re now satisfied that we have all the bases covered. However, we know a taxonomy is never finished and we are constantly making small revisions as the industry shifts.

How we use the taxonomy still varies from product to product, however. Our M&A KnowledgeBase has always used a taxonomy as the basis of helping customers find deals, and we have just ported that product over to the new taxonomy, meaning it has gone from 300 or so categories to more than 600 (and I know more is not always better, but you’ll have to trust me on this one, or better still sign up for a trial!). It’s a much more balanced representation of the tech, internet and telecoms industry than before.

This means our Market Insight Service, TechDealmaker and M&A KnowledgeBase are all using the same taxonomy, although only the last of those currently exposes it. We use additional themes to group our research in key areas, such as open source, enterprise security or our work with the European Union. We also use the taxonomy to drive internal tools to help us manage our coverage areas and output.

In future posts I’ll talk about specific elements of the taxonomy and also how we’re planning to roll it out across all our research, improve our search engine and overall make it easier for customers to find the research they need.

I’ve gathered all my current thinking on potential M&A in enterprise search in a SectorIQ that we published earlier this week to our customers. In it, I look at four main potential targets plus a few other small ones and look at a few of the likely acquirers. (This is the way we write all our Sector IQs, btw and they’re a great way of getting a quick grasp on what might be coming down the pike in any particular sector of the IT industry)

Fortunately those of you that are not our customers (yet!) are able to read it via our arrangement with the New York Times DealBook section. Click here to see the NY Times posting or go here to go straight to the report - and while you’re there, sign up for a trial of our M&A KnowledgeBase, where we’ve been collecting details of every IT, internet and telecoms deal since the start of 2002!

Finally, a quick word about the headline. We like to have some fun here at 451 with these things and while I appreciate that this one might have been pushing things a little in terms of clearly explaining what the report was about, when else would I be able to use it?

Welcome to the new 451 Group blog about information management. What’s information management, you may ask?

It’s the confluence of a variety of strategies organization employ to get their arms and exploit the myriad sources of data and information at their disposal. Specifically this means 451’s coverage of the following areas:

• Search
• Collaboration
• Content management
• Text analysis
• eDiscovery
• Archiving
• Storage
• Databases (relational & otherwise)
• Business intelligence
• Master & metadata management

It is written mainly by Kathleen Reidy and myself, and both of us will be at the AIIM Expo this week in Boston where we will be taking the temperature of the content management market & talking with a bunch of vendors and end users.

More on that and Drupalcon this week.

I’ve been attending LegalTech here in New York for the past few years, but this year things seemed to be different.Firstly, and most noticeably, every inch of available space at the New York Hilton on 6th Avenue was taken, spread across three floors. The corridors, which in less busy shows simply lead you to rooms, were lined with stands as were the exhibition spaces. It reminded me of the annual SIFMA Technology Management conference, which is a bit of a zoo and in the same location. But unlike the financial services industry, the legal industry and general counsel offices of corporations haven’t traditionally been seen as major buyers of IT, let alone cutting edge stuff.But there’s nothing like regulations to fuel a surge in the market. The changes the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which took effect in December 2006 and mandated that all electronic records were discoverable and that parties needed to be ready within 120 days of the start of a lawsuit to discuss their eDiscovery terms. This made eDiscovery a very hot market in 2007 (and helped Stratify to a nice valuation when it was bought by Iron Mountain in July 2007 for $158m).

But one of the messages I picked up pretty loud and clear is that law firms and legal departments have their eye on a much bigger problem, currently being done largely manually, but ripe for automation: document review. Figures of a $15bn market for document review now and a bill of $40bn by 2011 for overall review expense raised more than a few eyebrows among some prospective customers of document review vendors (many of which are also eDiscovery vendors, a market pegged at about $3bn). Jay Brudz, senior counsel, Legal Technology at GE, put it bluntly, “you know how many freaking lightbulbs we’ve gotta sell to pay for that?,” before making it clear that he had no intention in paying what vendors are asking.

The other point of tension I’m picking up is the one between intelligent archiving and search - the battle of ideas between those that think it’s better to do all the tagging at archive time and do some culling at that point (to avoid storing dupes and garbage) and those that think you should store everything and develop smarter search engines.

It’s clear - admittedly without any empirical evidence to hand - that protagonists in this space, be they general counsel departments, outside law firms or the vendors feel the rate is increasing so fast, their ability to cull the data at archiving time to make it more easily discoverable later can’t keep pace. There’s clearly somethig to that, given how rapidly talk has moved from gigabytes, to terabytes to petabytes to something an IBMer who handles data governance strategy for the company told me his clients call Goog-bytes - a generic term to mean so much data they can’t get their heads around it. After all, at this rate it won’t be that long before we talk of yottabytes in this arena, and what comes after that?

Search and archiving is something we at 451 Group have spent a lot of time on already and that is sure to continue in 2008.

I was asked by someone recently what I thought would be a major trend in text analysis (or text analytics, but I prefer analysis) in 2008. We covered this ground in 451’s annual preview of storage and information management. That’s available to 451 customers only, but the sub-title of the section on search and text analysis was ‘The big vendors move in.’

That referred as much to to search as it did to text analysis, with the emergence of Oracle and SAP as players in the search market along with IBM. t mentioned Microsoft but at that time, it looked as if Redmond was content to continue developing its own stuff. But then it bought Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) and that changed things. And, I think, along with SAP’s ownership of Business Objects, and by extension text analysis player Inxight Software, it may mean 2008 is a year if not quite of stasis, then certainly of a slower pace of innovation.

FAST had a lot of interesting stuff in its labs, probably too much judging by the financial mess it got itself into mid-2007. But it will be distracted this year as it gets subsumed into Microsoft and it ties itself ever tightly to the Microsoft platform. And similarly for thew 3 to 4 months that Business Objects owned Inxight as an independent company we heard a fair amount about its plans to leverage iunstructured information. Now SAP owns it, we may hear a lot less.