Is Autonomy the Undisputed Heavy Weight Champion?

I spent the first segment of my career (please note that I didn’t use the word half as it is just too depressing) in the enterprise software market competing against Oracle with a variety of startups and early stage organizations and fielded a few consulting organizations that relied on non-Oracle database systems (e.g. Microsoft SQL).  I am citing this history as experience to draw an analogy between the early days of “dealing with” the market perception of  Oracle to the current phenomena of the market considering Autonomy as the undisputed heavy weight champion of  the enterprise search and content management world for eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC).

And, as with the crowing of any champion, there are supporters and detractors on both sides spewing innuendo, have truths, unsubstantiated case studies, etc.  Its almost as exciting as a national election or the World Cup (well maybe not the World Cup).
As an example, in a July 12, 2010 Blog post by Stephen Arnold titled, “Autonomy: A Real Success. CMSWatch: Maybe Another Real Miss?”,  Mr.  Arnold takes exception to a Blog post from the CMSWatch Blog by Tony Byrne.  Both of these posts are excellent as they “stir the Autonomy pot” and therefore I will include them at the end of my post.  However, I think that, given Mr. Arnold’s agnostic nature, it is interesting that he seems to an advocate for Autonomy.

Mr. Arnold states that Autonomy is on track to hit $1.0 billion by the end of calendar 2010. The company has a proven track record of improving the performance of the companies it acquires. Autonomy’s management has demonstrated its ability to integrate quickly its acquired products with IDOL (the firm’s integrated data operating layer). The result is Autonomy’s knack of transforming the acquired companies’ position in their markets.
He goes on to state that there are other data that shed light on Autonomy’s track record, which I have documented Autonomy’s technology in my writings such as Beyond Search (Gilbane, 2009), the Enterprise Search Report (CMSWatch.com, 2004-2006), and Successful Enterprise Search Management (Galatea, 2009). Here are three points that must not be overlooked:

1. Autonomy has 20,000 plus customers plus around 1,000 licensees of its technologies for use in other enterprise software and systems
2. Autonomy has made intelligent acquisitions that has given the firm a strong presence in eDiscovery, rich media, and fraud detection. Autonomy has recently pushed into online marketing using capabilities from Ineterwoven and its IDOL framework. My research reveals that Autonomy has acquired companies to bring its technology to new markets so more content can be understood.
3. Autonomy has grown its revenues and generated a profit, making it possible for other UK based technology companies to ride the Autonomy horse in the race for government and venture funding.

I am not going to dispute any of Mr. Arnold’s statements as that is not the point of my post (please note that later on I will dispute the fact that all of Autonomy’s clients are happy).  I am just using these posts as proof that the same arguments that I heard about Oracle are now beginning to surface about Autonomy.  Let’s list a few of them:

1. Oracle/Autonomy has so many clients and licenses that why would a prospect even consider another vendor?
2. Oracle/Autonomy has acquired all of the best new technologies on the market so why would a prospect even consider another vendor?
3. Oracle / Autonomy management is so obviously smarter than anyone else in the market and therefore why would a prospect even consider another vendor?

The market bought into this “line of thinking” and the Oracle sales teams perpetuated the myths and used it to their advantage.  In fact, I can remember prospects telling me that they really liked my Oracle “knock off” (their words not mine) and understood the technological superiority of my product and understood and appreciated the TOC and ROI arguments that I had developed.  But, in the end,  and as communicated to them by the Oracle sales executive, even if Oracle turned out to be the wrong decision for all the reasons that I had sighted, they wouldn’t have to worry about losing their job if they went with Oracle and therefore that is what they were going to do.    At an even more frustrating level, I can sight prospect after prospect that spent the better part of a great lunch meeting railing against Oracle and then after the check came and was paid, indicated that they were unfortunately going to buy another round of Oracle licenses.

Don’t take my stories as “sour grapes” as I did in fact have my fair share of  success selling against Oracle.  And, don’t forget that at one point, the standard Oracle line in the industry was “What in the heck does Microsoft know about building databases?”  We all know the answer to that question (well, maybe not everyone).  The point being that technology vendors like Oracle and now maybe Autonomy think that they can reach a point of being too big to fail and so big and stable that it would be crazy to even consider alternative solutions.

Well,  the technology highway is riddled with the wreckage of companies and technologies that thought that they owned a marketplace and then one day a couple of “guys in a garage” proved them wrong.   Please note that I am not underestimating what Autonomy has done, the insightful intelligence of their founders,  their market share,  their momentum , their marketing budget or the their massive sales force. Nor am I overestimating the value of new ‘garage based” and superior technology.  I am merely stating that, just like we all saw with competition infringing upon the coronation of Oracle, we may also have the opportunity to witness some amount of legitimate competition taking market share away from Autonomy.

Now as promised, some thoughts on the “happiness” of  Autonomy users.  Mr. Arnold states in another of his pieces on Autonomy that based on research by IDC, “If the data compiled for the report are accurate, Autonomy has a big footprint and happy customers. Among the thousands of Autonomy licensees are AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Ericsson, FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission”.

Once again, I am not going to dispute what Mr. Arnold and IDC are saying.  However, I am going to offer an opinion and state some unscientific anecdotes that I have.  First of all, as with Oracle, many of the Fortune 500 have a license or two of just about everything available on the market and therefore it would not seem unusual for any of the organizations stated to have a copy of Autonomy software.

Second,  enterprise buyers are very politically savvy by nature and therefore one they make a decision to purchase something like Oracle or Autonomy, it would not be within their “political nature” to indicate publically they had made a poor decision.

Now, for the unscientific anecdotes.  I spent a good portion of just about every “working” day of my career talking with Fortune 2000 business line, IT and Legal Users about their needs (pain), past successes, past failure and plans for future purchases and “nirvana“ solutions.  Obviously, Autonomy has come up a time or two. And, without fail, the main themes that I have heard from Autonomy users are; (1) they don’t much like the proprietary nature of IDOL; (2) they think that it is too expensive; (3) Autonomy over promised under performed; (4) the integration of the acquired technologies didn’t seem to be working very well,  and;  (5) they were concerned that Autonomy had gotten so big and unwieldy that it (Autonomy) would have a very hard time being innovative in the future.  And, with the goal of full disclosure, I would have to say that, just as was the case with many Oracle clients that I talked to, most of the Autonomy users had plans to purchase additional licenses.

In summary, I am actually very impressed with what Mike Lynch has done and would not argue that they in fact be the undisputed heavy weight champion of the search and content management market.  However, I would also caution both current and potential users to not overestimate Autonomy’s ability to keep pace and no underestimate the power of the free market and its ability to nurture new search and content management technology support healthy competition.

After all , who would have ever thought that we would be using our iPhones or iTouches for eDiscovery (http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/iClearwell-Sets-Standard-as-First-E-Discovery-Companion-Application-iPhone-iPad-1288443.htm).

The full text of Mr. Arnold excellent Blog post is a follows:

In Harrod’s Creek, I can easily spot the real squirrel hunters. They have food. Mostly laconic, these hunters have a big pile of dead squirrels as proof of their competence. There is also the smell of fresh burgoo wafting from their log cabins. I can smell ability from my goose pond.


Lousy hunters have empty gun belts and squirrels shot when snacking on store bought food used to lure the critters. That’s a real danger — cheap tricks or just shooting wildly, often putting bird shot in an innocent’s backsides or the face like the 2006 incident between Vice President Dick Cheney and Texas lawyer Harry Whittington. Some faux hunters have just shot themselves in the foot. Ouch!

Azure chip consultants is a synonym for “bad hunter” in my opinion. Source: http://api.ning.com/files/LCP2NCaWo-ptCqGncB3hGsX8vuh8dnDzSJ0iLnkibas_/18holeinhandG.jpg

One of my two or three readers sent me a link to a write up called “Don’t Ogle Search If You Really Want Content Management”. In my opinion, the write up relies on insinuation, not facts. (I think that some folks are immune to facts, but I find facts useful.) In the article’s headline, the word “ogle”, for example, is one I don’t associate with information retrieval. (The publisher of this “ogle” opinion piece caught my attention in July 2008 with its similar assault on Attivio. My response to that misleading article is here.)

Yet another example of factless criticism of a vendor appears in this segment of the “ogle” write up about Autonomy, one of a very small number of search and content processing vendors with a consistent track record of technical breadth, sales, revenue, and profit:

From an initial focus on enterprise search tools, Autonomy has become a roll-up vendor after acquiring a variety of other information management suppliers such as Interwoven. As a financial strategy this can be successful, and investors seem to cotton to Autonomy. As a technology strategy, vendor roll-ups are problematic. Autonomy’s technology strategy is to rip legacy search subsystems from acquired products, replace them with some pieces from its own IDOL toolset, and then promote its particular approach to search as a distinct advantage for you. Specifically, Autonomy will try to sell you on the value of “meaning-based computing.” Even if you can get your mind around what meaning-based means, you should remain skeptical that Autonomy has technically spectacular or original services here. More importantly, you risk getting sidetracked from your original goal of, say, creating a user-friendly repository for your 50,000 Office documents.

These statements are presented without verifiable foundation to support the allegations in my opinion.

Autonomy is on track to hit $1.0 billion by the end of calendar 2010. The company has a proven track record of improving the performance of the companies it acquires. Autonomy’s management has demonstrated its ability to integrate quickly its acquired products with IDOL (the firm’s integrated data operating layer). The result is Autonomy’s knack of transforming the acquired companies’ position in their markets.

But there are other data that shed light on Autonomy’s track record, which I have documented Autonomy’s technology in my writings such as Beyond Search (Gilbane, 2009), the Enterprise Search Report (CMSWatch.com, 2004-2006), and Successful Enterprise Search Management (Galatea, 2009). Here are three points that must not be overlooked:

1.Autonomy has 20,000 plus customers plus around 1,000 licensees of its technologies for use in other enterprise software and systems
2.Autonomy has made intelligent acquisitions that has given the firm a strong presence in eDiscovery, rich media, and fraud detection. Autonomy has recently pushed into online marketing using capabilities from Ineterwoven and its IDOL framework. My research reveals that Autonomy has acquired companies to bring its technology to new markets so more content can be understood.
3.Autonomy has grown its revenues and generated a profit, making it possible for other UK based technology companies to ride the Autonomy horse in the race for government and venture funding.

In December a year or so ago, at the International Online Conference, in my for-fee, end note debate, I challenged Andrew Kanter (Autonomy), Charlie Hull (Lemur Consulting), and Dr. Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) about their views of search, content processing, and related fields. In front of an audience of about 300 search professionals, I pointed out that key word search was dead. I pointed out that most search systems did not understand the meaning of processed information. Autonomy’s Andrew Kanter strongly and politely disagreed with me. As I recall, he said to the audience and me:

Autonomy IDOL is the only product in the market that can understand the meaning and concepts of all information in any language, including audio and video. This has big implications for the content management market as no other vendor can do this.

I demanded some concrete examples to support his position. Mr. Kanter without missing a beat gave me four concrete examples drawn from Autonomy’s work in intelligence, search enabled applications, fraud detection, and rich media.

What did I do?

I listened, considered the evidence, and I conceded defeat. Facts convinced me.

Despite the proliferation of marketing baloney, facts about search and content processing are more important than insinuations and unsubstantiated generalizations. There is no excuse for any one to venture into a technical jungle without adequate preparation and forethought. Take a short cut at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and you would have bene fired when Dr. William P. Sommers ran the the firm’s Technology Management Group. Furthermore, unsubstantiated assertions are the method of some high school journalists and third tier consultants in my opinion.

As readers of this blog know, I am no fan boy of any search and content processing vendor. Spend 15 minutes with me, and you will learn that I can and will point out fact-based strengths and weakness of the companies I monitor. (For a list of the firms I track, navigate to this link.) MBA double-talk and half-baked arguments create confusion. Verbal wild firing brings little benefit to those trying to understand the complexities of digital information.

Autonomy is on track to hit $1.0 billion by the end of calendar 2010. The firm has been able to acquire firms that add to Autonomy’s customer base and extend Autonomy’s meaning-based technology to new markets. Its Zantaz acquisition expanded Autonomy’s footprint in eDiscovery, boosted Autonomy’s position in cloud computing, and was a spark that set off a wave of activity in the eDiscovery and online archiving sector. That’s how you kill real squirrels. Take aim. Bang. New revenue.

In the search and content processing market, Autonomy has been a leader in marketing and on target acquisitions. In my opinion, OpenText (the Canadian company competing with Autonomy in some enterprise markets) has had to follow Autonomy in a “me-too” fashion in an effort to try to keep pace.

For me, Autonomy continues to grow in a landscape littered with failures. The more important question is, “Why isn’t Autonomy like Delphes, Entopia, Fast Search & Transfer, InQuire, Siderean, STAIRS III, and many other search vendors which have run aground?

There will be no answers in an analysis which lacks facts and insight.

And there is another important question, “Why shoot wildly at Autonomy?”

I don’t know. Grandstanding like squirrel hunters with an automatic rifle and a bag of walnuts? Fun? Frustration with life, business, or traffic to the company Web site? A need to differentiate one’s business from a farrow of third-tier consultants?

My hunch is that some “experts” see an opportunity to make money by appointing themselves mavens or satraps in search and content processing. Grabbing for a brass ring from a carousel pony seems harmless enough. The logic could run like this: I use Google. Google makes search easy. Therefore, search is easy.

What better way to get sales leads than to make unsubstantiated claims about a company that in terms of customers, financial performances, and scope is arguably one of the world’s leading vendors in information retrieval and processing?

Anyone looking at search market facts should be able to figure out that unsubstantiated assertions have zero impact on a billion dollar enterprise. Wild shots and tricks call attention to the hunter, not the prey. And what is the point of the “ogle” write up in my opinion: Marketing hoo-hah or a need for attention?

I don’t know the difference between slander and libel. I will leave that to legal eagles.

I do know that Autonomy has happy customers. Autonomy has hundreds of OEM deals that continue from year to year. Sue Feldman, IDC’s search expert, recent analysis of Autonomy was fact-based and positive. Also, I know that Autonomy is growing. What some search dilettantes do not appreciate is that search start ups in the UK have a better shot at getting funding due to the uplift from Autonomy’s success.

And there is the matter of profits.

Outfits like Goldman Sachs and other market makers pay attention to companies that make money. With your job on the line in a search procurement, would you go with a struggling vendor or with an outfit that was a market leader?

Does Autonomy have weaknesses?

What software vendor doesn’t? My Overflight service had a glitch on July 7, 2010. My goslings had to troubleshoot a mistake I made in a script. Software is difficult to make perfect. You can ask Google how the Buzz code is working out. Why not chase down Microsoft and ask about the Kin? If you have a moment, get Larry Ellison on the line and ask, “How is SES11g working out for you?”

To sum up: Constructive criticism based on solid technical understanding and demonstrable evidence delivers real value. Here in Harrod’s Creek, when I want burgoo I seek out the real hunters who hit their target without resorting to unsportsmanlike tricks. You may want to avoid the faux hunters who take short cuts, sport Travel Smith vests, and glittering generalities.

Labels: Autonomy, eDiscovery, GRC, Microsoft, Oralce, Seach Technology, Search

posted by Charles Skamser @ 12:13 PM 0 Comments

Oracle vs. SQLServer Argument Hits eDiscovery Market

Having spent the last 20 years in the enterprise class software market I am very familiar with the age old argument about whether Oracle's DBMS or Microsoft's SQLServer is better. The Oracle bigots will tell you that SQLServer is slow, doesn't scale and just wasn't architected for true enterprise class use. SQLServer Biggots will tell you that Oracle is way too expensive. I will get in to some of the specifics later in this post. However, first I wanted to point out that the Oracle vs. SQLServer argument has now hit the eDiscovery market with CaseCentral's announcement that they have Migrated their On-Demand eDiscovery Platform to Oracle® Real Application Clusters.

Given the fact that Tom Thimot, CaseCentral President and CEO served as the vice president of central U.S. sales at Oracle, where his team grew license revenues from $50 million to more than $250 million in a two-year period and was also a key leader in the worldwide Oracle applications vertical organization that grew revenues by more than $100 million, it is no big surprise that he is an Oracle Biggot.

The Full Text of the Press Release is as follows:
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Aug. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --

-- CaseCentral, the leading secure SaaS platform for corporations looking to take control of eDiscovery, has migrated its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters to deliver better performance, scalability and availability, Oracle announced today.
-- CaseCentral's platform allows corporations to apply disciplined business process to litigation and regulatory matters, reducing risk and business disruption, boosting productivity, and controlling costs. CaseCentral has delivered its proven, SaaS platform to over 1,100 customers and more than 7,250 registered users.
-- CaseCentral actively manages several hundred terabytes of evidence -- 95 percent of which is unstructured data such as emails, office documents, and images -- and has hosted over 25,000 individual litigation matters.
-- San Francisco-based CaseCentral initially deployed its clustered database environment in 2007. Its purpose-built Java-based platform is deployed on a multi-node cluster of HP BladeSystem servers running Linux.
-- CaseCentral utilizes Oracle Enterprise Manager to help provide the monitoring and management necessary to meet the mission-critical needs of their clients. CaseCentral will migrate customers currently supported by Microsoft SQL Server to the clustered Oracle Database environment.

Supporting Quote
"CaseCentral offers a highly scalable, on demand software platform that allows companies to own the eDiscovery process and their law firms to own the execution," said Ted Sergott, Chief Technology Officer, CaseCentral. "At a moment's notice, a new or existing client can send us millions of documents and terabytes of data to support an eDiscovery matter and thanks to our architecture, we are fully prepared to accommodate that volume of mission-critical data. Running on Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters, CaseCentral offers customers a scaleable, secure and available platform to meet their eDiscovery needs."

Supporting Resources
About Oracle Database: http://www.oracle.com/database
About Oracle Real Application Clusters: http://www.oracle.com/clusters
About Oracle Enterprise Manager: http://www.oracle.com/enterprise_manager/index.html
To download free, evaluation versions of Oracle software, go to: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html

About CaseCentral
CaseCentral is the leader in on-demand eDiscovery software for corporations looking to take control of eDiscovery. CaseCentral enables companies to efficiently and defensibly respond to today's legal and compliance challenges, consistently, accurately and faster, while delivering overall savings of 30-60 percent and increasing earnings per share (EPS) by up to 1.1 percent. The company's on-demand eDiscovery software platform, with its secure, multi-party architecture and configurable litigation workflow engine, includes best-practice solution templates that enable companies to be operational within hours. CaseCentral is the first to provide eDiscovery business intelligence dashboards giving customers real-time insight into review rates, quality rates and costs per document by case, firm or user. CaseCentral is used by more than 25 of the Fortune 100 and 81 of the AmLaw 100. Founded in 1994, CaseCentral is consistently chosen to handle many of the most complex and highly visible litigation projects in the nation. For more information, call 1.800.714.2727 or visit http://www.casecentral.com/.

About Oracle
Oracle (ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com/.

Oracle vs. SQLServer
According to a recent whitepaper available on the Microsoft site title "Leaping Forward: SQL Server 2008 Compared to Oracle Database 11g", Microsoft SQL Server has steadily gained ground on other database systems and now surpasses the competition in terms of performance, scalability, security, developer productivity, business intelligence (BI), and compatibility with the 2007 Microsoft Office System. It achieves this at a considerably lower cost than does Oracle Database 11g.

So, Microsoft contends that Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 outperforms Oracle in the areas that matter to your business. The following summarizes some of the mission-critical areas in which SQL Server 2008 excels:

Performance and Scalability: SQL Server scales to some of the world’s largest workloads, evidenced by strong industry standard benchmark results. Customers such as Unilever, Citi, Barclays Capital, and Mediterranean Shipping Company support their most mission-critical applications on SQL Server. Customers running SQL Server 2008, including large ISVs such as Siemens and RedPrairie, report excellent experiences with the latest scalability enhancements. SQL Server is recognized as Best Seller and Top Growth Best Seller by CRN Magazine.

Security: The National Vulnerability Database (NIST) reports over 330 critical security vulnerabilities in Oracle database products over the last four years. During that same period, SQL Server 2005 experienced ZERO vulnerabilities. This result comes from secure engineering processes as part of the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, comprehensive security features, and a robust Microsoft Update infrastructure. This winning combination reduces both security risks and patching downtime for customers. According to one expert, Oracle is five years behind Microsoft in patch management. Computerworld reports that two-thirds of Oracle DBAs do not apply security patches.

Developer Productivity: SQL Server works with Microsoft Visual Studio® to help provide an integrated development experience, allowing developers to work in one environment across the client, mid-tier, and data-tier. SQL Server 2008 takes a step further with new development features. In contrast, Oracle’s array of tools and SDKs, assembled via acquisition, require developers to learn and work across numerous interfaces. In fact, IDC reports that Microsoft is the number one application technology platform of choice.

Business Intelligence: SQL Server is part of the Microsoft integrated Business Intelligence platform, which spans data warehousing, analytics and reporting, score carding, planning, and budgeting. SQL Server is in the Leader’s quadrant in both Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms and Magic Quadrant for Data Warehousing. SQL Server 2008 introduces more innovation with new data warehousing and business intelligence features. According to Oracle’s latest price list, the company currently charges up to an additional 800% or more on top of their base database fees for similar functionalities.

Microsoft Office System Integration: SQL Server helps customers gain better business insight and make faster decisions through the product's tight integration with the familiar Microsoft Office System user interface. For example, add-ins such as Data Mining for Excel uses both SQL Server and Microsoft Office to provide insight into customer data. IDC recognizes Microsoft as the fastest growing BI tool vendor. Oracle has Microsoft Office Plug In, which includes subset of the functionalities that SQL Server provides, but charges an additional $30,000 per processor.

Total Cost of Ownership: SQL Server has a simple tiered SKU licensing model. Oracle, on the other hand, has a complex array of options and add-ins that are required to develop, deploy, and manage most large-scale applications. The SQL Server integrated development environment and easy-to-use development tools lead to improved Time to Solution and Time to Value for applications and business insight. SQL Server is highly successful in the areas of self-tuning and automated administration, resulting in a much simpler deployment and management profile than Oracle Database 11g. SQL Server is designed to work seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft software stack, which can help provide smoother development and deployment experience and higher performance than Oracle.

Summary
As I started this post, I grew up in the enterprise software market and therefore learned to tow the Oracle line and bash SQLServer as a nice little departmental database that would never have what it takes to play in the big leagues. However, I believe that Microsoft has come a long way and now that I am "playing" in the legal market, I would recommend that any technologies sitting on the SQLServer platform will have to be considered just as strong as the technologies sitting on Oracle.

And, I hope that someone out there in the litigation market challenges this position so that we can rekindle some of the debate that was so much fun for so many years in the general enterprise markets. And, it is arguments / debates such as these that will help to usher the litigation market into the world of leading edge technology.

Labels: CaseCentral, DBMS, Oralce, ORT, SQLServer

posted by Charles Skamser @ 4:02 PM 0 Comments

eDiscovery Search Predictions for 2008

As I continued my education eDiscovery search platforms over the past couple of weeks and subsequent update to my eDiscovery Paradigm Shift Blog, I came across a really interesting update by Stephen E. Arnold on the current state of the search market in general titled "Search Rumor Round Up, Summer 2008". And, although it is not specific to search in the eDiscovery space, his overview of search is outstanding and very applicable to what we have to look forward to in eDiscovery.

As I pointed out in my post titled "eDiscovery Search Case Law Emerging", the courts are starting to catch up in regards to the value and impact of search in the eDiscovery process along with the subtle nuances of search technology. And, as I talk to law firms and the legal departments of many of the Fortune 500 about their eDiscovery issues, I am finding that the topic of search and more recently conceptual search is being raised more often in the context of culling, de-duping, finding potentially responsive and privileged docs and gaining a better understanding of their data in general. However, I have also found a complete lack of understanding of current search technology and it applicability to the real needs of the litigators and their litigation services consultants.

Further, I am curious to understand the foundation for this weeks acquisition of Attenex by FTI. Was this a fire sale because the conceptual search market has not matured and therefore Attenex has not been able to reach its full potential as a conceptual search based review platform? Or, was this a brilliant move by FTI to add yet another leading edge technology to its roster based upon accelerating market demand? Just for the record, I happen to think that it is the latter. But, there are some intriguing arguments for the former.

The observations and comments in Mr. Arnold's article that I believe are most applicable to eDiscovery are as follows:

Rumor 1: More Consolidation in Search
As eDiscovery technology matures and the obvoius winners in technology and the appropriate strategy/formula for success begins to emerge, we are seeing the same basic consolidation in eDiscovery in general and will continue to see even more eDiscovery technology consolidation over the remainder of 2008 and in to 2009.

Rumor 5: Search Will Become a Commodity
I believe this prediction to be true at the desk top / SaaS based eDiscovery platform level where the user is wanting to search several 100,000 docs in a short period of time. However, at the service center production level where the document pool is terabytes of data, I believe that there is still room for several search technology leaders that can figure out how to get these massive search project done in hours as apposed to days.

Rumor 6: Search Is a Component of Other Enterprise Software
I believe that there is no doubt that user are quickly going to expect sophisticated search to become a seamlessly integrated part of any eDiscovery platform.

Rumor 9: Key Word Search Is Dead
This is my favorite prediction for eDiscovery as I can visualize all the current eDiscovery vendors cringing.

Rumor 10: A Hardware Maker Will Put Search on a Chip
Coming from a background of integrating the appropriate and ripe software technologies into firmware / hardware solutions, I absolutely agree with this prediction. And, it fits really nicely with the "behind the firewall appliance" direction that some of the archiving vendors are going.

All of this being said, the full text of Mr. Arnold's article is as follows:

I am fortunate to receive a flow of information, often completely wacky and erroneous, in my redoubt in rural Kentucky. The last six months have been a particularly rich period. Compared to 2007, 2008 has been quite exciting.

I’m not going to assure you that these rumors have any significant foundation. What I propose to do is highlight several of the more interesting ones and offer a broader observation about each. My goal is to provide some context for the ripples that are shaking the fabric of search, content processing, and information retrieval.

The analogy to keep in mind is that we are standing on top of a jello dessert like this one.

The substance itself has a certain firmness. Try to pick it it up or chop off a hunk, and you have a slippery job on your hands. Now, the rumors:

Rumor 1: More Consolidation in Search
I think this is easy to say, but it is tough to pull off in the present economic environment. Some companies have either investors who have pumped millions into a search and content processing company. These kind souls want their money back. If the search vendor is publicly traded, the set up of the company or its valuation may be a sticky wicket. There have been some stunning buy outs so far in 2008. The most remarkable was Microsoft’s purchase of Fast Search & Transfer. SAS snapped up the little-known Teragram. But the wave of buy outs across the more than 300 companies in the search and content processing sector has not materialized.

Rumor 2: Oracle Will Make a Play in Enterprise Search
I receive a phone call or two a month asking me about Oracle SES10g. (When you access the Oracle Web site, be patient. The system was sluggish for me on June 14, 2008.)The drift of these calls boils down to one key point, “What’s Oracle’s share of the enterprise search market?” The answer is that its share can be whatever Oracle’s accountants want it to be. You see Oracle SES10g is linked to the Oracle relational database and other bits and pieces of the Oracle framework. Oracle’s acquisitions in search and retrieval from Artificial Linguistics more than a decade ago to Triple Hop in more recent times has given Oracle capability. As a superplatform, Oracle is a player in search. So far this year, Oracle has been moving forward slowly. An experiment with Bitext here and a deployment with Siderean Software there. Financial mavens want Oracle to start acquiring search and content processing companies. There are rumors, but so far no action, and I don’t expect significant changes in the short term.

Rumor 3: Microsoft Will Tidy Up Its Search Operations
This rumor suggests that Microsoft, a giant company with many barons and dukes controlling fiefdoms, can deploy one search solution. I don’t think that will happen quickly. The Certified Gold Partners who make better search systems than those available from Microsoft can rest easy for the foreseeable future. Search is too complicated in general and within Microsoft for a one-size-fits-all solution. I anticipate more search options, not fewer. Coveo, Exalead, ISYS Search Software, and others will benefit from the Microsoft approach to search for months, if not years.

Rumor 4: Semantic Search Will Unseat Google
Semantic technology is now within reach of almost any search and content processing vendor. The technology is relatively well known and the processing power is available at a reasonable cost. By itself, semantic search will not be enough to shift the market share that Google is amassing in the consumer search and enterprise markets. Google’s been chugging along for a decade, and it has yet to meet significant competition other than itself. Semantic technology is a component, not a Google killer in the hands of a competitor at this time.

Rumor 5: Search Will Become a Commodity
No, as I described in my Web log post on May 12, 2008, about the “search elephant”, search has too many different meanings for one solution to sweep the board. Each unit of a company has many different search and content processing needs. It is, therefore, difficult to convince the legal department to use the open source Lucene tool for eDiscovery. The legal eagles will want to use a service from Brainware or Stratify. Down the hall, the chemical engineers need to find chemical structure. Search consists of niches, and these will bump heads, overlap, and been quite confusing to sort out. In that confusion, consultants and different vendors thrive.

Rumor 6: Search Is a Component of Other Enterprise Software
This is a rumor related to “search will become a commodity”. True, enterprise software vendors will include more robust search and content processing systems in their software, market the heck out of the enhancements, and bundle it with whatever the client wants to buy. But enterprise applications open the door to point solutions that meet specific needs. So search certainly will become ubiquitous and the ecosystem will spawn new species of information access. Nope, search is going to be with us for a long, long time.

Rumor 7: The Google Search Appliance Doesn’t Work
False. The GOOG has more than 10,000 licensees, a fleet of partners, and the OneBox API that can make the Google Search Appliance work like Roy Roger’s prescient horse, Trigger. The GOOG has had an impact on the enterprise search market. It’s easy to complain about the Google Search Appliance. It’s harder to explain how a company with such an interesting approach to sales can sell such a large number of units. Obviously a certain sector of the market wants these Google boxes.

Rumor 8: Social Search Will Revolutionize Enterprise Search
Nope. Social functions can be useful, but in regulated industries, there are some challenges associated with social search. Social search is the equivalent of a restaurant’s weekly special. If the customers gobble enough of the dish, the special could be promoted to a specialty. It’s early days for social search in an enterprise, but it’s not too soon for law enforcement and military intelligence people to embrace the concept. Social search is quite useful in certain areas, but one needs to have lots of social data to crunch to see the technology in full flower.

Rumor 9: Key Word Search Is Dead
Key word search is hard for many people. Alternatives and options are needed. But key word search is too useful in certain types of research to go the way of the dodo. Investors like to think that a whizzy interface without a search box is the next big thing in search. Interfaces are becoming more important by the hour. But an interface without a way to look for words and phrases won’t carry the day.

Rumor 10: A Hardware Maker Will Put Search on a Chip
What’s happening is research and investigation. The Exegy appliance could be boiled down to a smaller gizmo. At some point in the future, any search appliance could be reduced to firmware. I think the likelihood of search on a chip is high, but it’s not something you will be able to buy in 2008. Intel invested in Endeca for a reason. Intel had a brief love affair and then a messy divorce with search vendor Convera years ago. Other chip-centric outfits are poking around in this area as well. On the horizon, yes, but appliances will be about as close to search in a single package that we will have in 2008.

Observations
Most people don’t realize that search is like a giant jello dessert. There is a shimmery, attractive quality to the whole thing. When you start to pick it apart, the substance becomes slippery and tough to pin down. It’s easy to be fooled by surface changes like semantic search and social search, which are like a squirt of whipped topping on the jello. Do you have candidates for rumors you think I should have included in my round up. If so, use the comments section of this Web log to post your favorites. To avoid legal hassles, I may have to edit some of your inputs. Ah, life in the modern world is so rewarding.

Labels: Chip based Search, Conceptual Search, eDiscovery, eDsicovery Appliances, Google, Keyword Search, Oralce, Search

posted by Charles Skamser @ 9:36 AM 0 Comments