Whit AndrewsSearch has been a rough business for years, now, with Microsoft loading improving free software into its discharge chute and heaving it out as it goes, with IBM signing up with mighty Yahoo and doing the same, with Google standing on the brink of the enterprise sales slurry pit and throwing appliances in like it’s trying to build a steppingstone path. Growth’s limited, and most of the money has been coming in the horizontal applications like the spectacularly lucrative e-discovery niche where Autonomy, Recommind and Zylab have to clean their cash rakes regularly to keep the coin from clogging them. I’m at LegalTech this week and I’ll have to wipe algorithms off my trouser cuffs when I walk the show floor. The next person who says “concept searching” to me will quite possibly face legal intervention. (There will be ample lawyers around to facilitate, one presumes.)
There’s always a new vendor, though. Last week alone I caught briefings from Columba Global Systems, which is mostly aimed at the law enforcement/intelligence vertical, especially with an eye toward external data sources. Columba’s out of Ireland, and they tell a compelling story that I find eminently believable about the value of findable, shareable information in law enforcement. We don’t get fat loads of inquiry on that over here in the enterprise search stall where I swing my pickaxe all the livelong day, but it’s one of those obvious things that seems to generate the sort of contingency funds people like to spend.
You might not have heard of Columba before, but chances are much better than you know the people at Information Builders, a vendor known for its Business Intelligence more than search. Now enter them in enterprise search, though, as well, with WebFOCUS Magnify (did you shout “FOCUS” in your head on reading that? If not, try again, I’m still seeing kinda blurry). They’re certainly not the first to dream big for the convergence of structured and unstructured data – not a convergence so much as a widening position on a spectrum, as my redoubtable colleagues Mark Beyer and Rita Knox have pointed out assiduously and tirelessly. This brings Information Builders (and Columba!) to the list of vendors who are exceptions to the general rule that structured (or “columnar,” as Mark puts it) data and unstructured data (or “steaming piles of alphanumeric strings meant for meat to peer at,” as I put it) dwell apart.
I count these, so far: Columba, Information Builders, Business Objects (which bought Inxight to get there), Endeca, Progress Software (via EasyAsk) and Attivio. There are a few others or more, but they’re lost in the NDA mists (did I do inquiry with them as a client or did I take a briefing? How many PSTs ago was that, and was it before the laptop got stolen or after, before the crash last week or after?) They’re all welcome to enter their names in the comments and make fun of my memory.
We made predictions about this about two years ago, after marathon meetings in which analysts darted around between communities like characters in Law and Order and other NBC series. I suspect that for once, we may have been too conservative in our predicted timing, but perhaps not. I wonder how you feel about it all.
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