CMS Watch Autonomy Feed

How Fast is Attivio?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 09:55:00 -0400

The Fast Search & Transfer news continues to keep me on my toes. The Norwegian business weekly Dagens Næringsliv seems to have come up with some decent evidence (English translation) of many things everybody already suspected -- and a couple of new ones.

It covers the Convera acquisition and the "separate" but surprisingly coincidental deal where Convera bought several million's worth of Fast software it didn't need. Or as rival Autonomy (which was also in the running for buying Convera) has pointed out, Fast pumped up its revenues for that quarter with part of the money it paid for Convera, then got back for licenses. The DN article also covers a few other very suspicious deals, and some outright fraud. It's now even getting to the point where calling Fast "the Enron of Norway" is getting long in the tooth.

While that train wreck was unfolding before my eyes in slow motion, my fellow analyst Theresa Regli pinged me last February about a new enterprise search company called Attivio. Information Today raved about their new product AIE, with analysts quoted as saying things like "they are moving rapidly to develop tools that will eliminate many of the practical barriers to easily and efficiently deploy robust enterprise search solutions," with the unique selling point of "data integration plus search and content processing," a "hot niche for the next few years."

Since I'm always interested to find out more about robust enterprise search tools to fill hot niches for the next few years, I scrolled down to read what the Attivio CTO would explain about how the product would achieve what "should have been solved by the integration of text search and XML into relational database managers such as Oracle." As it turns out, it is based on a "mash-up" of open source Apache Lucene and "licensed commercial software."

As described in our Enterprise Search Report and on this blog, Lucene itself is just a Java text search API. To be able to actually gather, convert, and query content you need many more components. It is perfectly feasible to put together a working enterprise search product around the core Lucene JAR (as demonstrated by IBM's Omnifind Yahoo! Edition). But in order to get there, and to have Lucene index, for instance, Office documents and PDFs, you will have to first convert those documents to text. The filters to perform that conversion can be bought from other vendors, based on open source such as pdftohtml, or you'll have to build them yourself, which is a lot of work. There aren't too many vendors building their own filters, or even just modifying open source to do so. So if you do build the filters needed to use Lucene yourself, you'd probably like to mention this as an advantage, and as Attivio states, "we developed our own Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and PDF connectors to improve performance and reach deeper into the files than the conventional converters."

Since, like most enterprise search products, Lucene isn't based on a database and couldn't even connect to such content without help, it isn't surprising Attivio had to develop a "unique RDBMS data loader" which "indexes the tables individually." This, again, is presented as a major advantage -- remember, converting documents and integrating structured and unstructured data are "a hot niche."

I remember seeing a vendor at a conference a few years back, with banners jokingly stating its product was "buzzword compliant!" Attivio certainly seems to have that skill down. The engineering effort is marketed as a "technology mashup," "breaking down silos" between "open source and commercial software." "We have lived with the challenge of having to choose between the precision of databases and the richness of search for a long time, but no longer" sounds great, but I don't see Oracle and Thunderstone's RDBMS-based solutions breaking out in a sweat just yet.

Maybe my over-exposure to marketing materials and flashy demos has turned me into a cynic, and Attivio's downloadable trial version will have to do at least a decent job to convince me of the product's added value. Fortunately, that free download is "coming soon!" Yes, I'm sorry, I'm finding it increasingly hard to turn off that cynicism, especially when I turn back to the DN article about Fast Search & Transfer. Attivio was founded by former Fast employees and the Attivio CTO is Sid Probstein, formerly vice president of technology at FAST. More importantly, Attivio's CEO is Ali Riaz, who was COO at Fast but unexpectedly left the company in late 2006. Well, in hindsight, perhaps not so unexpectedly, though DN quotes him as saying "I had nothing to gain from manipulation of the accounts. I had no shares in the company. I wanted shares and quit because I didn't get any. If you want to find out what's wrong with the accounts, you need to look at those who could gain from it. And it wasn't me."

Dagens Næringsliv doesn't appear to agree with Riaz, however; if you want the full analysis of the what and why, I suggest you read the article. I myself find it surprising that the CEO of a technology startup backed by $6.2 million in venture capital would drive an Audi R8, but that doesn't mean anything (other than that I'm envious of his car). I also find it surprising a former Fast COO would be co-owner of a company reselling Fast licenses, but walking like an Enron duck and quacking like an Enron duck doesn't necessarily mean that it's really anything like Enron. And Attivio's clouding the core technology in marketing hyperboles and buzzword compliance is slightly disconcerting, but many renowned companies engage in the same practice.

DN quotes Riaz as saying "you should be much better at praising the people who have success, instead of pushing them down." And I would certainly love to be proven wrong by Attivio's software; as soon as I get my hands on the trial download I requested, I will let you know if it lives up to the high expectations. As one of my teachers in school once told me, "I'm known for being cynical, or even sarcastic -- myself, I prefer to call it healthy skepticism and mild irony."

Being a cynic isn't a lot of fun -- but for now, I would advise you to be at least healthily skeptical of what Attivio has to offer.

Announcing the E-mail Archiving and Management Report

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:29:00 -0400

This may well go down as the busiest period in CMS Watch's history as this month we launch yet another new technology evaluation report, The E-mail Archiving & Management Report 2008. From our release:

EAM technology has become critical to both commercial and government enterprises -- but for a variety of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. This has led to a similarly diverse set of approaches from EAM suppliers...

It's somewhat surprising that this report -- which provides comprehensive comparative evaluations of 14 leading EAM vendors -- is one of the first of its kind anywhere.

Subscribers, you will be getting your copy very shortly. Others can order a copy or download a free sample here.

The report loosely groups EAM vendors into three categories:

Policy-Centric: Autonomy, CA, Open Text, IBM, and Symantec

Archive-Centric: AXS-One, EMC, HP, Mimosa, and ZL Technologies

SaaS: Dell, Fortiva, Google, and Microsoft

The research has taken more than six months to complete, and in the process we have talked to many customers and users of EAM systems. The conversations were illuminating and we look forward very much to continue those discussions moving forward.

Symantec to OEM Autonomy technology

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:58:00 -0400

Blink and you might have missed it, but Symantec signed an important OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deal with Autonomy the other day that was announced with little fanfare. However, it's an important deal, and here's why...

Symantec has long wanted to play in the content management sector, for just like EMC they see content management as an excellent feeder for and extension of their broader storage and archiving business. Their first steps came with the ingestion of KVS's Enterprise Vault archiving product into their portfolio. Since that time Symantec has seen growth and potential for their archiving (mainly e-mail focused) business. This potential is driven in part by the fashion for e-discovery in the US (due to new federal rules), but more broadly by server and storage optimization demand for Exchange environments.

The deal with Autonomy could allow Symantec to play much more broadly in the content technologies market place. Firstly by boosting their search capabilities (currently supplied via an old relationship with Alta Vista) and potentially bringing them into broader archiving situations (SharePoint) via products such as Meridio. Symantec is a very well known brand, and they currently hold a strong position in the EAM (e-mail archiving and management) sector. With the Autonomy deal, they could begin to make an impact elsewhere -- to their benefit as well as Autonomy's, who remains associated almost exclusively with its search technology.

I suspect that this arrangement is more than a simple OEM deal, that it is strategic in nature to Symantec's broader archiving and ECM ambitions. That over the coming year we will see Symantec start to appear more and more as key player alongside EMC, Oracle and HP (who recently acquired Tower), in an ECM market that is becoming increasingly focused on archiving, imaging, and compliance.

Symantec to OEM Autonomy technology

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:58:00 -0400

Uncle Sam pushes Records Management and Archiving...and Meridio too

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 16:15:00 -0400

The Gimmal Group's Dan Elam recently pointed me to an important and seemingly under-reported guidance memo (pdf) to U.S. federal government CIOs from Karen Evans. Evans serves as a kind of über-CIO for e-government at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The biggest news comes in the third paragraph:

When planning for and acquiring information systems and services, agencies must incorporate records management and archival functions, including the cost of implementing and maintaining those functions, into the design, development, and implementation of information systems.

The memo continues that OMB will monitor adherence as part of its overall evaluation of how different agencies make IT investments, presumably through its oversight of the so-called "Exhibit 300" process, where agencies must prepare business cases for large IT projects. Many federal employees look at preparing 300Bs as a hassle, a bureaucratic check-the-box exercise to justify a technology acquisition they already believe they need, and they don't always follow OMB guidance (and occasionally that makes sense, as OMB's guidance is sometimes incomplete or unrealistic). But on the whole the system works, and resembles successful approaches to technology investment review that you see in the private sector.

The shocker comes in an ensuing paragraph, where Evans recommends:

A recently finalized SmartBUY agreement for records management software provides a secure, scalable, and high-performance solution for the management and control of documents, records, and other enterprise content.

SmartBUY refers to a newish government-wide acquisition mechanism, where federal and state agencies can very easily purchase commercial software (typically from resellers) at cut-rate prices. There is actually only a single RM vendor (and in fact, the sole ECM vendor) in SmartBUY: Meridio.

Meridio is an Ulster-based software company that built a name for itself providing RM services for (the old) Microsoft SharePoint. Now, as ECM Suites Report readers know, Meridio's solution can be called many things, including "inexpensive" and "developer-friendly" (both fine attributes!), but is less well known for "scalability" and "high-performance." You probably also know that Microsoft, being Microsoft, spurned its once-favored partner by building its own RM services into MOSS 2007. And what did the jilted Meridio do? Turned the other way and quickly sold itself to UK-based search vendor Autonomy, who seems to have ambitions in the e-discovery solutions space. Perhaps most importantly, there is a big difference between RM and Archiving. Even if Meridio works well as an RM product for you, an Archiving solution it is not.

You don't need to be a genius to figure out what's going to happen next. Harried federal managers trying to complete their IT business cases are going to budget for a slew of Meridio licenses -- "that's what Karen Evans told us to do" -- licenses that in turn will almost surely sit unused. Meridio/Autonomy will not see all the funds -- the Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business reseller gets a piece -- but as a U.S. taxpayer I would look to OMB to point out a more competitive set of choices. Well, let's just assume the Meridio mention in the memo was a hasty mistake. A quick search shows 269 "Records Management Software" products available to federal buyers from two-dozen different suppliers. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the problem is that Meridio is a non-US-based vendor, but rather, that no single vendor should be promoted in guidance like this.

Indeed, the bigger problem is the latent message in the memo: Government agencies have an RM and Archival problem, and here's some RM software you can quickly procure to fix it. Remember that records management is only secondarily a technology problem.

Nevertheless, simply raising awareness is a very good thing. Most U.S. federal managers, like managers everywhere, often simply don't consider the long-term archival, retention, and disposition implications of the information systems they develop. And with government trying to move more at "Internet-speed" I don't really blame them. The Meridio meander notwithstanding, I think the bigger impact of this message may fall on the Archiving side, rather than the RM side, though the implications for both should not be underestimated.

More generally, I think this dovetails with broader trends in cost accounting that ensure that the expenses of storing and ultimately getting rid of stuff should fall under total cost of ownership. Consider the "recycling and disposal" fee you may pay when having your car's motor oil changed. Economists are increasingly looking at things like solid waste and carbon footprints when evaluating the real costs of various initiatives.

So why not the same for information? Surely the cost of an information management system should entail more than just the expense of getting data into a repository and playing with it. At some point your investment calculations need to account for the cost of either storing it long-term or getting rid of it, properly. It's good to see OMB catching up with its European counterparts and providing some leadership in this area.

A New Wave of Enterprise Search?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:40:00 -0400

At the AIIM Expo in Boston and Documation Paris earlier this month, I met with several enterprise search vendors, old and new. There's a growing movement afoot to de-throne the old guard; talk of replacing FAST and Autonomy seemed to be uttered by every vendor that wasn't a household name.

It started with Attivio, which is full of defectors from FAST, convinced they can do search better. "We're fixing everything that used to bug our customers," said Andrew McKay, SVP of products, speaking of his days at FAST. He spoke at length about statistical analysis, probability, and the company's focus on standard search with a business intelligence context -- talking with such speed, I wondered if he'd stop to breathe. A lot of the value proposition sounded Autonomy-esque. Their booth was smartly and strategically placed next to Google's, which no doubt got them foot traffic. There's already a lot of hub-bub about Attivio out there, but as of AIIM, they had only one customer thus far. We'll see how the hype measures up once the technology is out there for a while and customers can tell us how it really works.

In Paris, I admit my surprise at the number of local enterprise search vendors on display, including Antidot and Polyspot; proof that there's no shortage of local, eager-to-please vendors in just about every geography. Most have only been around for a few years. I chatted at length with François D'Haegeleer of Sinequa (founded in 2000), a company that's been picking up customers in Europe, and thus gains our watchful eye. Their heavy focus on linguistic analysis (with a quarter of their team consisting of linguistic researchers) seems to appeal to the language-loving French, and Sinequa's technology has already replaced Autonomy's at couple of major French press agencies, including Les Echos. The company also just opened an office in London, where fellow French search vendor Exalead established a footprint some time ago. Will the French triumph north of the channel, or will it be another Waterloo?

"Nous sommes la nouvelle vague d'Enterprise Search," D'Haegeleer said, and I stood amused by the metaphor, and also baffled by the choice of the terms the French choose to translate vs. not (other vendors said "moteurs de recherche d'entreprise"). Controlled vocabularies, anyone?

Characterized by self-conscious rejection of conservative paradigms and a spirit of youthful iconoclasm, the New Wave of French cinema took the world by storm, emphasizing the triumph of the individual. Will the individual searchers of enterprise information triumph from the new wave of enterprise search? Are these new products really more "lightweight" than the heavyweights of the search world? It's too early to tell, and we won't render judgment before hearing from customers who've worked with the technology for a time. Stay tuned, we'll keep you posted on these vendors and the others we cover as we update our Enterprise Search Report throughout the year.

A tale of two search technology selections

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:09:00 -0400

CM Pros organized an event on the topic of enterprise search last week, with two case-study presentations and a fair bit of discussion among attendees. The key takeaways: website search is a lot harder than you'd think, and the attitude of a vendor really matters to your success.

When talking enterprise search, the "multi-repository enterprise" scenario is where all the really complex technology and fancy infrastructures reside today. We shouldn't forget, however, that website search -- powering that tiny form field in the right-hand top corner of your site -- remains one of the most common scenarios. Listening to the experiences of a large membership association was a clear reminder that it's certainly not as simple and straightforward to get right as many would think. (We can sympathize -- trying to get the cmswatch.com search right is an on-going struggle for us.)

The first case was presented someone who works for an integrator involved in the project. He is architect for their CMS and was therefore also put in charge of website search (which is a fairly typical arrangement, as the level of expert knowledge needed for website search is usually underestimated). He explained how it started out the same way many of these projects do -- "why don't we just get Google?" -- and how the organization decided to embark on that journey without much further discussion.

This led to exciting tales of a chase to find the lost Appliance somewhere in the server center when the "try-before-you-buy" clock was already ticking. It then turned out the Google Search Appliance (GSA) didn't actually match the original, rather straightforward 2-page requirements specification. Nor was it really as cheap as originally envisioned (one box wasn't enough). And, to boot, whereas the association imagined itself to carry some major clout with the vendor (their site is a very popular), it turned out to be nigh impossible to get Google to do customization. Before the web search goes live, they will need to bring in outside help to get some things ironed out on top of the Appliance.

Though it would be easy to blame Google for what went wrong, the presenter gave the company credit for delivering good support and a well-performing product. To the audience it seemed he handled it well, the product in itself was fine, but the main mistake the customer made was in underestimating what they were about to implement in the first place. As I overheard someone whisper next to me, "and to think this was a relatively simple site search project."

The second presentation was an account of the selection and implementation at a pharmaceutical company. They had twice before attempted to implement search functionality across multiple disparate repositories, and both times the project was aborted. This time, however, the project was officially declared a "success." As such, there was even an investigation of why the third attempt, almost against all odds, finally turned out right.

We were taken on a text-book product selection tour, but what stood out was there was definitely no one-horse race here. As someone who has uttered the caveat emptor "try against your own corpus of content" more than he cares to recount, I can certainly agree with the thorough proof-of-concept they put three vendors through. If CMS Watch ever awards a prize for heeding our advice, this POC might be nominated.

Though you should never underestimate the importance of how the technology functions, one of the main criteria was the attitude of vendors towards the project. Arrogance doesn't pay off in a well-executed test-drive, and in that respect it wasn't surprising the smallest vendor of the three scored points on cooperation and flexibility.

It was interesting to see the two opposites on one evening. One obviously struggled with what they expected to be a simple project, and wasn't much helped by their vendor. The other, on the other hand, braced itself for the worst but came out on top -- not in the least because they made sure the vendor they picked would be cooperative. So though it is easy to be cynical about the success rate of search projects, it can be done. Just heed the lessons learned, and come well prepared.

The game of musical chairs continues in enterprise search

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:48:00 -0400

In the latest shuffle in enterprise search, SAS, known for business intelligence and analytics software, has announced today it acquired Teragram, natural language processing specialists. While it is tempting to see this as the confirmation of a trend of convergence in BI and enterprise search, that would be downplaying the ubiquitousness of the underlying components.

Enterprise search products are complex systems. So much so, in fact, that I would be hard pressed to point out any one vendor that has completely developed their solution from scratch, on their own. Key components are often licensed from specialists; for instance, most of the industry relies on either the INSO or the KeyView filters to convert various document types to text they can index. If you've ever wondered why the number of filetypes vendors claim to be able to process can be so strikingly similar across the board, that's why.

Of course, when the specialists are gobbled up by larger fish, this can lead to some interesting moves across the room. The KeyView filters, for instance, are now owned by Autonomy. Oracle Text, in a distant past, used the INSO filters, but the company switched and Secure Enterprise Search now makes use of Autonomy's KeyView filters. Stellent owned the INSO filters (which they acquired from eBT), and Oracle acquired Stellent; therefore the Stellent/INSO filters are now the Oracle filters, even though their flagship enterprise search product uses the competing components.

Confused? Who wouldn't be. So why bother trying to keep track of these embedded solutions? Well, if you're about to give up on your current implementation in despair or trying to make up your mind about the key differentiators between the vendors on your shortlist, it might help to know if you're actually about to decide between a Lotus Elise, an Opel Speedster or a Tesla Roadster. The big differences might not be where you expect them to be, and a good look under the hood may make all the difference.

By now you may wonder how Teragram's acquisition got you from musical chairs to car talk. Well, let the music start: SAS used to work with Inxight, Teragram's main competitor, while Teragram's technology has showed up in products from Fast Search & Transfer and Verity... And as the music stops, and all frantically grab their chair, suffice it to say: we're there, checking the engines... so you don't have to.

Enterprise Search Vendor Landscape, Circa 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli and Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:16:00 -0500

You might be tempted to select enterprise search vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market -- status either conferred by analyst firms or assumed by the vendors themselves. However, CMS Watch analyst Theresa Regli argues that you need to look more closely at product and vendor alike -- and understand where both are headed -- to properly evaluate your longterm risks and opportunities in an evolving marketplace...

FAST, Microsoft and the meaning of working together

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:02:00 -0400

Both FAST and Microsoft have announced that they are "working together" on integrating FAST ESP with MOSS 2007. This has had analysts in a flurry, with Forbes even blaming a 3% drop in Fast Search & Transfer's stock price on the "agreement." In reality, it's just a fancy way to introduce ESP's SharePoint 2007 content collection along with a Web Part presentation template (with document-level security through ESP's Security Access Module).

MOSS 2007's success has forced search vendors outside of the Microsoft oriented (Coveo, Mondosoft and dtSearch) to have a "SharePoint strategy," with Autonomy somewhat more quietly announcing its own Web Parts over a month ago. FAST's marketing may have confused investors, but it's always interesting to see one part of Microsoft embrace what another part might see as competition, particularly with Redmond now touting MOSS Search as an "enterprise search" platform.

Content cleanup in the former East Germany

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 02:31:00 -0500

There's no time like the holidays for catching up on back issues of The Economist (don't worry, we're baking cookies, too), and this morning I found myself engrossed by a tale of pattern matching. No, not pattern matching of snowflakes or Christmas knits, but of a set of documents ripped into 600 million pieces by East Germany's State Security Service (better known as the Stasi), back when the Berlin wall was being torn down and the mob was at the gates. The Stasi were afraid of documents falling into the wrong hands, so when the shredders failed, they frantically resorted to tearing up documents piece by piece. And you thought getting your enterprise search engine to pull off late-binding security was tough?

In a project currently underway at Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology, software is being used to find patterns in these millions of Stasi-created fragments of paper and re-assemble them, jigsaw-puzzle style. In going through the fragments, the software is grouping the scanned shreds of paper together by identifying patterns in handwriting, color, paper texture, even ink color. Then, once a group of related shreds is found, the software puzzles the papers together. In their haste, the Stasi actually helped this process quite a bit -- most of the fragments of the same document were found in the same bag. Or bucket. Category. Taxonomy facet, if you will.

Like enterprise search tools that perform some sort of text mining and subsequent clustering -- such as Autonomy, FAST or Endeca -- this software has the capacity to learn and refine what it puts together, identifying new content as more or less like the original items in the set. When it gets confused (such as when a document has distorted or torn edges), it refers the act of judgement to a human being. But what's especially interesting about this software is that it actually spawns slightly altered versions of itself that compete for computer time on the basis of success at finding matches. Now that's something I'd love to see from my local enterpise search vendor.

There's a few lessons to be learned here. First, this is a multi-year project with dedicated resources, which is more than most companies are willing to commit to their own document scanning and indexing efforts. Second, while pattern matching may seem like an exact way to search for things, there's always factors in play that require judgement and refinement -- be it subtle linguistic differences, synonyms, or even how someone happened to tear something up.

And finally -- although history will surely welcome the Stasi's carelessness -- you should never take content security and storage lightly. You may think content is "secure enough," until you realize just how good your new enterprise search tool is at indexing all your content, but how bad it is at tying into your ACLs and showing the right results only to those who should see them.

Now, why can't I get my snowflake cookies to all look exactly alike?

Coming second in a one-horse race

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:30:00 -0500

While writing reviews for the new Enterprise Search Report, I found myself frequently saying you should test the effectiveness of a given product against your own corpus of content, which is reiterated in the Report's "Advice" section. But I can't help but wonder how often an actual bake-off between vendors on a shortlist is organized.

I was giving a presentation on the "enterprise search technology landscape" at cmf2007, along with practitioner's cases presented by Brian Schurmann Michels (Novo Nordisk) and Carsten Suhr (DSB, Danish Rail). Both were using search engines to sift through their intranets, but circumstances and solutions were on the opposite ends of the spectrum: Novo Nordisk has a Google Appliance index their relatively structured content (most of which is tagged with keywords), while DSB uses Autonomy to federate disparate content sources (and to allow for their ambitious future plans). This made sense and they both seemed quite content with the technology they were working with in their respective settings.

Both companies were thorough in their implementation. Brian (who has the official job title of "searchmaster") described the detailed comparison they had made of the results of the Google Appliance vs. Microsoft's SharePoint at Novo Nordisk. Carsten talked about the search scenarios and personas DSB had developed: how could the search engine effectively help employees perform their daily tasks? Both were excellent examples of how I would suggest you'd go about selecting and implementing search technology.

Of course, the $100,000 question (putting the estimate at the low end) for me was how they had arrived at the choice for their respective vendors. Why would Novo Nordisk consider trading in their Google Appliance -- which by all accounts they were rather content with -- for SharePoint search? Well, because "SharePoint is being rolled out anyway, whether we want it or not." And why did DSB shell out for Autonomy licenses? Well, because "people in our IT department had experience with Verity's products" (and Verity was acquired by Autonomy).

So, for all their intensive testing and planning -- and DSB did perform a thorough PoC with Autonomy before committing -- the main question remains: what do you do if the only entry in your bake-off wins second prize? When the race is run, it's too late to enter a new horse -- which is why I'll stick to my mantra of investigating the alternatives in the early stages of any search project.

Mondosoft: going once, going twice...

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:35:00 -0400

...and sold to the bidder in the back. According to Danish website Computerworld, enterprise search vendor Mondosoft, which is currently in liquidation, has been bought by fellow countrymen SurfRay.

While SurfRay, a search vendor mainly active in northern Europe, had expressed interest in acquiring it as early as last spring, it was generally expected Mondosoft would be sold to Asger Jensby's JMI Invest. According to SurfRay, with the core Mondosearch technology they could provide a serious alternative to FAST and Autonomy, but at a lower price point. (And yes, you'd be right in thinking that every Volkssearch would like to compare itself to Ferrari and Rolls-Royce.)

The last waltz may be reserved for JMI Invest, however: SurfRay is not really interested in Mondosoft's SharePoint-specific offering, Ontolica. It might still be sold separately to JMI and turn up in a new guise as a WebSphere tool. SurfRay's director Martin Veise has indicated, however, that he first wants to speak to Mondosoft's employees about this (which is probably what FAST should have done when they acquired Convera).

(Thanks to Janus Boye for keeping tabs on the Danish press.)

Autonomy buys Meridio

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:42:00 -0400

Major enterprise search vendor Autonomy announced today that they will acquire Meridio, the Northern Ireland-based Records Management vendor which had originally hitched its wagon to Microsoft SharePoint.

It's an intriguing move and one that may make a lot of sense. Then again, it could just be a mistake, and advising existing Meridio customers how to approach this deal is tricky to say the least.

On the plus side, Autonomy took search to a whole new level when they launched, and remain a leader in that space. They have carved out a strong niche for themselves in Government and Intelligence particularly, and Meridio -- along with the Verity tools Autonomy picked up a couple years ago -- could potentially add to a strong e-discovery, risk, and compliance platform. Autonomy was already selling heavily into e-discovery scenarios, but the logical prophylactic step after any discovery episode is better information management in general, and records management in particular.

Where I have my doubts is in how this might be executed. The cultural differences between the two firms are huge. Autonomy still revolves almost entirely around its founder Mike Lynch, a brilliant but at times very divisive figure. Meridio on the other hand has long been a more collaborative and transparent firm (though with strong strategic leadership), so time will tell how that works out. Perhaps more importantly, in re-architecting the Meridio solution into a broader platform offering, I fear many existing customers may get left behind in the process. Verity itself tried a broader information management roll-up strategy, without good results, only to hit a dead-end and get acquired by (the smaller) Autonomy.

This does make strategic sense for Meridio, since being reliant on Microsoft (SharePoint in particular) to deliver you a business stream is a dangerous situation for any partner. Meridio clearly pined to be acquired by Redmond, but the SharePoint team simply built their own RM capabilities instead. Microsoft is already getting much more aggressive about going after deals alone, and it was only a matter of time before Meridio would find the door shut to them. But if you bought Meridio as an enterprise-ready records management system to support SharePoint, well you will certainly want to talk to your account reps quickly to get some firm guarantees about future development and support.

Autonomy buys Meridio

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:42:00 -0400

It's an intriguing move and one that may make a lot of sense. Then again, it could just be a mistake, and advising existing Meridio customers how to approach this deal is tricky to say the least.

Autonomy: Find the Search

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:08:00 -0400

This week, Autonomy announced that German call center provider Quelle.Contact has chosen its IDOL product "...to power its new Content Management System (CMS)." Hold on -- wasn't Autonomy in the enterprise search business?

Though the enterprise search market is growing steadily, it's not growing fast enough to accommodate huge sustained expansion rates for every vendor. If you're a venture capitalist or hedge fund maven, you're not looking for just a couple of bucks -- you want to make it big in return for the risk you're taking.

The reality is that every search vendor's software does two things -- index and query -- which are in practice very hard, but seem to the world like simple commodity services. Perhaps that's why, in researching the upcoming new edition of the Enterprise Search Report, search vendors have been telling me they do lots of things: their software is a platform, or it's really business intelligence, or maybe knowledge management -- almost anything but search. If pressed, they might call it "information access" or "discovery," but "search" has become a four-letter word, especially to the largest vendors.

Autonomy may therefore be pleased that financial analysts picked up on the news as a "content management system deal." It turns out, however, that IDOL is used to federate search across multiple repositories for Quelle. To be fair, Autonomy acknowledged to me they don't actually do the CMS bit. It's not a big deal when investors get confused, but as a customer, you are well advised to stay focused on the core competencies of your suppliers.