Entries Tagged 'Search' ↓

Most of the information management team are attending the 4th annual 451 client event, which takes place in Boston next week, November 2-3, so I thought I’d let you know what we’re up to.

Four of us are presenting, here’s the dates/times (all ET) and themes:

• Nov 3, 3.30-4.15: Matt Aslett – Open source to the rescue?

Can open source really help enterprises cut costs and ride out the economic storm? What has been the impact of current conditions on open source adoption? How is this being reflected in the business strategies of vendors – both open source specialists and traditional proprietary vendors?

• Nov 4, 11.00-11.45: Nick Patience & Kathleen Reidy – E-Discovery to Information Governance: From Reactive, Unavoidable Cost to Proactive Cost-Avoidance.

E-discovery is a market without a lot of discretionary spending – legal events and investigations occur, and require that organizations produce relevant electronic information, no matter the difficulties or costs. This fact has driven lots of vendors from various sectors to the e-discovery (also known as e-disclosure) market: it is driving business in the archiving, enterprise content management and enterprise search markets, as organizations want to figure out how to better prepare for litigation before it occurs.

• Nov 4, 11.45-12.30: Simon Robinson -  Storage Technology Is Thriving in the Economic Downturn

The economy is shrinking, but data is growing. Almost universally, storage vendors claim they can help IT ‘do more with less’ by squeezing more value out of storage assets to meet rampant data growth and stiffer retention criteria. This presentation will examine how three key trends in storage innovation – optimization, unification and the cloud – are helping some storage vendors thrive in this uncertain climate. The session will conclude with a vendor panel discussion.

Henry Baltazar is also attending and we’re all avaiable for 1:1s, though some of our days are getting pretty near to full. Contact your account rep about booking a slot.

If you are a client and you’re not attending then you’re missing out on one of the key beneifts of being a client!

If you’re not a client and you wish to attend, you can do that too, only you’ll have to pay to get in. Either way, you can register here.

Beyond information management all our other themes will be address including cloud (a lot!), security, virtualization, eco-efficient IT and our popular M&A panel, which always comes right before cocktails on day 1.

See you there!

I’m pleased to announced that the first market sizing report from our Information Management practice here at 451 has been published. It covers the enterprise search and text analysis markets, providing revenues figures from 2009-2013 and our growth expectations for those years.

We look at the reasons for that projected growth, identifying 10 drivers overall, one of which is the rise of search-based applications. At some point in the future we’d like to try and size that market, although it’s too nascent to put a number on it just yet.

You can download an executive summary or find out more about the report here.

Suffice to say I’m very excited about this new addition to our coverage, adding the quantitative element to our many years of analyzing the market on a qualitative basis.

This report will be updated every six months with new figures and every 12 months with new analysis an figures. We provide analysis of the industry throughout the year through our Market Insight Service in shorter, more regular form.

This is not only the fist in a series of reports on the enterprise search business, but also the first in a series of market sizing reports within information management. The next will be on the data warehousing business, due in early 2010, written by Matt Aslett.

In one of those Autonomy announcements that seemingly appear out of nowhere, the company has declared its intention to “transform” the relational database market by applying its text analysis technology to content stored within database. The tool is called IDOL Structured Probabilistic Engine (SPE), as it uses the same Bayesian-based probabilistic inferencing technology that IDOL uses on unstructured information.

The quote from CEO Mike Lynch grandly proclaims this to be Autonomy’s “second fundamental technology” – IDOL itself being the first. That’s quite a claim and we’re endeavoring to find out more and will report back as to exactly how it works and what it can do.

Overall though this is part of a push by companies like Autonomy, but also Attivio, Endeca, Exalead and some others into the search-based application market. The underlying premise of that market is database offloading; the idea of using a search engine rather than a relational database to sort and query information. It holds great promise, partly because it is the bridge between enterprise search and business intelligence but also because of the prospect of cost savings for customers as they can either freeze their investments in relational database licenses, reduce them, or even eliminate them.

Of course if the enterprise search licenses then get so expensive as to nullify the cost benefit, then customers will reject the idea, which is something of which search vendors need to be wary.

Users can apply to joint the beta program at a very non-Autonomy looking website.

Now that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is done, it got me thinking more about Yahoo and it’s position as a pioneer of the web. That it was one is not in doubt; its directory was indeed a first and useful. But how much else did it actually pioneer? Have a look at a list of Yahoo’s acquisitions.

• Search – surely the cornerstone of the business, yet its very first search engine was licensed from Open Text in 1995. Sure, it went on to build its own and do some great work, but now with the deal done with Microsoft, Yahoo has exited the search business.
• Webmail – I recall getting a great Yahoo email address when that came out in 1997; it was a pioneer, but it got there by purchasing Four11.com and its RocketMail service . Now my account is overrun with spam and unusable (yet the company has the temerity to regularly threaten to cut me off for having too much mail and not using it enough, all of which is spam that its own spam filters can’t control. Hmmm.)
• Personal publishing – it was an early major player in personal publishing now called blogging, but again it got there largely by purchasing GeoCities for an enormous amount of Yahoo stock.
• Advertising – it pioneered banner ads on the web but as we all know but caught out by keyword search innovation from Google (which it built, rather than bought). And it had to buy Overture from Idealab.
• Rich media – the Broadcast.com deal unleashed Mark Cuban on an unsuspecting world.
• Photos – to its credit and bought Flickr and then largely left it alone
• Social bookmarking – same goes for De.licio.us

But if the rest that can be said for it is that Yahoo knew when to leave its acquired companies alone, to give them space to grow and continue innovating then all that’s left is a dwindling brand and company with some choice assets left intact for others to pick up over time. As this article pointed out recently, many of these acquired assets have been closed down, some only after a few years.

There is still innovation happening within Yahoo, plenty of it and I wish the folks at Yahoo working in the labs on some great semantic technology, among other things the best of luck. But touting a new home page just last week doesn’t give me much hope that Yahoo really gets the distributed, read/write Web. Who cares about home pages?

And of course Yahoo isn’t going anywhere soon, it has plenty of cash in the bank and a new revenue stream courtesy of Microsoft. But I doubt it will last out the 10 years of this deal.

One of things all this demonstrates is that M&A is different in different parts of the tech industry. In enterprise software quite often a company is buying a customer base and its ongoing maintenance stream – this is how Oracle has grown. But on the web with people not paying you directly and with very low (to nil) switching costs to another search engine, serving up a different set of ads, things are very different and you have to focus on core competences, not run after each new fad just as it’s peaking and buy your way into it.

Enterprise search company Vivisimo has appointed a new CEO and president as the company aims to scale up. Co-founder and previous CEO Raul Valdez-Perez becomes chairman. John Kealey, the new CEO has been on the company’s advisory board for the past 18 months and so knows the company well.

In terms of executive positions he was most recently CEO of iDirect Technologies, which was acquired by Singapore Technologies in 2005. He’d held previous positions at SBC Communications. Calderwoodm who has worked alongside Kealey for many years was a founder and managing partner of Amp Capital Partners, a VC firm in Virginia and also worked at iDirect. He has many years of software management experience while at Baan.

The CEO search apparently started last year and Kealey was an early choice but wasn’t available until now.

We’ve noted before that Vivisimo that was being bad-mouthed by its competitors over and above the usual level of FUD you see in this or any other tech market though we couldn’t figure out why. However we said then that it seemed misplaced to us and this move would seem to indicate that the company is certainly going in the right direction. We look forward to getting an update from John in the near future.

I started off this year’s Enterprise Search Summit in New York last week with a dinner sponsored by New Idea Engineering and Attivio on Monday night, which was highly enjoyable, despite my jetlag – having to try and stay up the first night in from London. Thanks to those folks for the invite and the conversation.

Katey and I were not allowed to sit in any of the session this year from some strange reason. So I can’t tell you first hand about what was interesting or not or the attendance in the sessions. Go figure. It also wasn’t that conducive to meeting end users, which is a main objective of attending these things.

Katey reckoned attendance overall was slightly down on last year, but not spectacularly so (I was at different conference and so had to miss last year’s).

So away from those two disappointments, we did have a fairly full docket of meetings with vendors, which were generally lively, with good give and take. Where we say ‘451 research to follow,’ it means our clients can expect a research report on the company in the near future.

Some of the highlights:

Attivio – CTO Sid Probstein is always chock-full of ideas and so always good to have a sitdown with him. CEO Ali Riaz is entertaining on a whole different level. The company appears to be going great guns and is at the forefront of the drive to combine structured and unstructured data as we have said before.

BA-Insight – not really a search company or a text analysis company; more of a piece of information management middleware that aims to increase ‘findability’ within SharePoint. As any SharePoint users, especially those in an environment with multiple SharePoint sites – that can only be a good thing. Connectors to other search engines coming. 451 research to follow.

Coveo – the company was out in force at this conference having just launched version 6.0 of its search platform featuring better scalability, connectors and mobile functionality. We covered that product update a short while back.

Endeca – met chief scientist Daniel Tunkelang for the first time. Clearly the owner of an active mind, Daniel presents a different face to the search company. His thoughts on the conference are here.

Google – the typically on-message briefing from Google. It owns the low end and is increasingly taking chunks out of the mid-tier, but still no sign of the management layer enterprises needed to get their arms around the myriad Google search appliances lying around most large organizations. It will probably appear out of the blue at some point though, this year, I’d imagine.

Microsoft – Nate Treolar was a great evangelist for Fast Search & Transfer while a product manager, and so it seems appropriate that he has the term ‘evangelist’ in his title at Microsoft where he’s working not only on the SharePoint search ecosystem but other programs such as ‘conversational’ and ‘actionable’ search; talking and doing, hey, what else is there?

PerfectSearch – we don’t usually see too many companies at this conference that we haven’t spoken to before, but PerfectSearch is one of them. It sells a search appliance and some of the founders have a Novell background, hence its Orem, IT HQ. 451 research to follow.

Vivisimo – from what we’ve heard the company is going well, both in the indirect (OEM) ad direct markets. We’ve noticed how often this company is being bad-mouthed by its competitors (over and above the usual FUD in any tech market) though we’re not sure why. Perhaps because Pittsburgh isn’t as fashionable as Boston or the Valley? Don’t really know, but it seems misplaced based on our experience. It’s making good headway with Lexis-Nexis, which will be important in the eDiscovery market as well with other customers that have demanded confidentiality (pretty common in the eDiscovery market). 451 research to follow.

We have two ’summit’s coming up in the next few weeks on the east coast that we’ll be attending.

We’ll be at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York May 12-13 at the Hilton on 6th Avenue. We have a bunch of meetings already but still have room for more, so if you’re attending and would like to meet (end users in particular, but vendors too), please get in touch with myself or Katey.

And just a few weeks later we’ll be in Boston where I’ll be at the 5th annual Text Analytics Summit. I’m doing the Sunday night graveyard slot once again on May 31, laying out my assessment of vendors fo but last year (it’s called “Top Tips on Vendor Choices” in the agenda). I recall it was enjoyable and we ended up taking the conversation to the bar afterward; a tradition I intend to continue this year. I’m also on a panel at the end of Day 1 (June1), right before cocktails (I’m seeing a trend here). Likewise, please get in touch if you want to meet up. I’m staying in Boston June 3 to meet clients, then back to London.

Just wanted to make a quick addition to Nick’s post about Interwoven search.

The Interwoven name is not lost entirely, it is just being removed from the WorkSite, RecordsManager and Universal Search products in favor of reviving the iManage brand.  I’m not sure why Autonomy wants to bring more brands into the mix, when there is already Autonomy Zantaz, Autonomy Meridio and so forth; the overall info governance story might seem stronger if the individual components weren’t all still branded separately.

In any event, we have Autonomy Interwoven Web Solutions now, which does make sense since WCM is what the Interwoven brand has always been most strongly associated with, despite its success in the legal market.

And it appears there’s been some IDOL magic with Interwoven TeamSite, similar to what Nick described with Universal Search.  Autonomy announced today that:

Autonomy’s core infrastructure software, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), is now the underlying technology for TeamSite in version 6.7.2.

We haven’t been briefed yet on what exactly this means but again, as Nick noted, the speed of these integrations leaves us scratching our heads, unless this is the fruition of some work that was started prior to the acquisition.  The press release does also note:

A series of new modules leveraging additional capabilities IDOL brings to TeamSite will be released over the coming months.

We’ll be getting all the details in the coming weeks and will provide more comprehensive analysis at that point.

So Autonomy has closed the acquisition of Interwoven and released a few details of its product plans. We’ll be hearing more in detail from senior management in the next couple of weeks, but a couple of things jump out at you when  you peruse that document.

Firstly the usual, magical IDOL integration has happened again. What Autonomy is calling iManage Universal Search, is of course very similar in name to Interwoven’s Universal Search, which was powered by Interwoven’s agreement with Vivisimo.  Now, just like that! – Vivisimo has been swapped out for IDOL. That’s not surprising of course, as everything Autonomy does is based on IDOL.

But the speed of integration seems unlike anything else we see in the industry and leaves us scratching our heads as to how this can actually happen so quickly, especially as we don’t believe IDOL to be a very lightweight, REST-like interface or anything like that.

Secondly, it looks as if the various product names within Interwoven – iManage, Discovery Mining, TeamSite and so on will be retained, while the company name disappears.

But, as I say, we’ll hear more soon and will report back in the form of a research update on Autonomy.

I might catch a lot of readers with that title, but of course I don’t really know for sure what will and won’t be in the next version of SharePoint.  Microsoft is still mum on the topic and I suspect will remain so until the SharePoint Conference slated for October.  This event was held in March last year; it seems logical it has been delayed this year to time the event with Office 14 announcements specific to SharePoint.

I read Guy Creese’s post last week on what he thinks will be in the next version of SharePoint and like Guy, I get a lot of questions in this vein.  I agree with Guy that SharePoint.next will have search improvements (we already know that one) and more sophisticated administration (we all hope). I’ll be surprised to see dramatic improvements in the transition between hosted and on-premise SharePoint in this version, I think the marketing is likely to lead the reality in this area for sometime to come, but perhaps I’ll be surprised.

I often get questions more specifically (from vendors) around what Microsoft isn’t going to do and reading Guy’s post, I thought it would be interesting to comment on what’s left out.

On the social software front…

There’s been some debate of late about whether or not SharePoint is an “Enterprise 2.0″ tool at all (or what, in fact, that even means, if anything). But anyone who saw Lawrence Liu pitch SharePoint versus IBM Lotus Connections to a packed room at Enterprise 2.0 last year, would certainly assume Microsoft has ambitions in this area.  It’s worth noting however that Liu left Microsoft not long after that for Telligent Systems, which sells community software as an adjunct to SharePoint.  Liu presumably knows more about the SharePoint roadmap than we do, so looking at Telligent’s roadmap (limited version here) is probably a good indication of where Microsoft won’t go in social software in this next release (think community analytics, bridging internal and external communities, and feed aggregation).

It’s not about WCM.

Making SharePoint ubiquitous for content-based collaboration is Microsoft’s number one goal and this means improved admin, search and social software, to my mind.   So what will get left out?   I don’t think we’ll see any major changes on the WCM front.  Microsoft marketed the WCM capabilities in MOSS 2007 when it first came out, as it stopped development on its stand-alone WCM product, Microsoft CMS (which came from its 2001 acquisition of nCompass) in favor of Sharepoint.  But this seems to have died down and vendors like Sitecore are doing well selling more sophisticated WCM with SharePoint integrations, apparently with cooperation from Microsoft.  WCM for large, customer-facing sites, is really not where SharePoint strengths lie and Microsoft will likely let this one stand much as it is as it invests in other areas (Sitecore even sells a bundle for intranets, showing some market opportunity for WCM even in SharePoint’s sweet spot).

What about records management and archiving?

There’s some records management today in SharePoint, but it’s limited to SharePoint environments.  Improved admin across server farms could help here but it doesn’t seem likely Microsoft is going to go far beyond this and this doesn’t address the archiving issue at all.  Vendors like Open Text, Symantec and EMC are banking on their products’ abilities to manage and archive content (including email) from multiple repositories including SharePoint.  And this seems like a market that will be relatively immune to changes in SharePoint.next — indeed, changes that make SharePoint more popular are likely only good news to these vendors, at least in the short term.

I’m sure there are other gaps vendors are filling where they may be some continued opportunity after SharePoint.next, but those are the big ones that jump to my  mind.