By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: September 9 2010 00:50 | Last updated: September 9 2010 00:50
Google has unveiled changes to the way it presents search results in what it described as one of the most significant updates in its 12-year history.
The new approach is intended to help users find results more quickly, though some search experts said that indirect changes to how users conduct their searches could also have a wider impact on the many businesses that advertise on Google or rely on traffic from the search engine.
The new feature, called Google Instant, displays full search results as users type in queries, without waiting for them to finish typing or to hit “enter”. “It’s searching before you type – we’re predicting what query you’re likely to do and giving you results for that,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s head of search products and user experience.
The approach should shave two to five seconds off the average search, Ms Mayer said.
Sergey Brin, co-founder, said the technological advances that had contributed to the new feature highlighted “a little bit of a new dawn in computing”, as companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon experiment with new user interfaces to make it easier to find and use information.
Google said it could not yet determine how far Google Instant would change search behaviour, but some analysts said the impact of the launch could reverberate through the online economy that has built up around the Google search service. “It’s potentially enormously significant,” said Greg Sterling, a US search engine analyst. “Anything that changes the way people interact with search results will affect the many businesses that rely on search.”
He and other analysts said that search users could be drawn to the top results that Google returns as they type their queries, giving extra prominence to companies whose websites come out high in search results. By putting greater emphasis on the top results, the change could have important implications for any business that uses so-called search engine optimisation to try to gain prominence in search results, Mr Sterling said.
Google executives said the new feature should not change the search results that users eventually click on, since the underlying relevance algorithms used to determine the order in which results are shown had not changed.
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an industry website, said that while the changes might have a marginal impact, suggestions that they would undermine current search engine optimisation practices appeared overstated.
Some analysts also predicted that the Google Instant would change the way that search engine users interact with advertising, since adverts will also appear linked to Google’s predictions about what a user is interested in.
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Showing posts with label Enterprise Search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enterprise Search. Show all posts
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Friday, October 10, 2008
Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, September 2008
This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies. Their capabilities include search; federated search, content classification, categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop search to address user-controlled repositories in order to locate and "invoke" documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.
We consider all enterprise search vendors to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant, although they are part of the market. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies and technologies.
We recommend that large commercial and government enterprises select at least an information access platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. These enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often, enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for certain important projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science support.
Information access technologies access applications such as document management, Web content management and relational database management systems to provide users with insight into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition, it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.
We consider all enterprise search vendors to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant, although they are part of the market. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies and technologies.
We recommend that large commercial and government enterprises select at least an information access platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. These enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often, enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for certain important projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science support.
Information access technologies access applications such as document management, Web content management and relational database management systems to provide users with insight into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition, it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.
Monday, April 14, 2008
KMWorld.com: What’s the New Face of Knowledge Management?
KMWorld.com: What’s the New Face of Knowledge Management?
Here’s a shocker: There was a time when knowledge management wasn’t very well accepted. The early proponents—self-described "global, big-picture" thinkers—made a critical strategic error. By overloading the significance of KM with visions of utopian "transparent organizations" and "corporate agility," they gave the reigning executives of the day the perfect exit route. Had they simply asked for technology support for certain broken business processes (as many did, but not all), they probably would have gained a fair share of executive buy-in. But instead they insisted on weighing down the conversation with talk of "the sharing organization." To which, the typical executive simply replied: "We already have sharing technology. We have networks, and file shares. We have email. We have meetings. Why should I spend more money to do something we are already doing?"
Here’s a shocker: There was a time when knowledge management wasn’t very well accepted. The early proponents—self-described "global, big-picture" thinkers—made a critical strategic error. By overloading the significance of KM with visions of utopian "transparent organizations" and "corporate agility," they gave the reigning executives of the day the perfect exit route. Had they simply asked for technology support for certain broken business processes (as many did, but not all), they probably would have gained a fair share of executive buy-in. But instead they insisted on weighing down the conversation with talk of "the sharing organization." To which, the typical executive simply replied: "We already have sharing technology. We have networks, and file shares. We have email. We have meetings. Why should I spend more money to do something we are already doing?"
FT.com / Services & tools / Search
FT.com / Services & tools / Search
The future of search: It's how, not where, you look
,By Alan Cane, FT.com site
Published: Mar 28, 2007
The time staff waste searching for "stuff " - the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively - has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours - a quarter of their working day - searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as "enterprise search ", a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind's head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: "Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
"An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time. "
So Autonomy uses "spiders " and "ants " - intelligent software - to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing - known as "federated search " - are unworkable: "They glow red hot and melt. "
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like "Turkey " will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: "The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision. "
She argues that search technologies have improved "by leaps and bounds " in the past two years: "Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user's query and give a meaningful response. "
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: "The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog. "
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: "This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements. " It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don't know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: "There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be, " he claims, "but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment. "
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: "We have lots of information that is unsearchable - valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation. "
The BBC uses several search tools - Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: "At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
"We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience - the people who pay our licence fees. " "Infax ", a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document - whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery - exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don't know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
The future of search: It's how, not where, you look
,By Alan Cane, FT.com site
Published: Mar 28, 2007
The time staff waste searching for "stuff " - the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively - has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours - a quarter of their working day - searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as "enterprise search ", a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind's head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: "Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
"An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time. "
So Autonomy uses "spiders " and "ants " - intelligent software - to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing - known as "federated search " - are unworkable: "They glow red hot and melt. "
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like "Turkey " will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: "The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision. "
She argues that search technologies have improved "by leaps and bounds " in the past two years: "Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user's query and give a meaningful response. "
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: "The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog. "
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: "This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements. " It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don't know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: "There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be, " he claims, "but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment. "
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: "We have lots of information that is unsearchable - valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation. "
The BBC uses several search tools - Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: "At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
"We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience - the people who pay our licence fees. " "Infax ", a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document - whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery - exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don't know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
PC World - Business Center: Gartner: Enterprise Search Pervasive by 2012
PC World - Business Center: Gartner: Enterprise Search Pervasive by 2012
Thursday, April 10, 2008 2:20 PM PDT
Enterprise search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years, according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews.
"Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises" by the end of 2012, according to materials from a presentation Andrews gave at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo conference in Las Vegas this week. Gartner refers to enterprise search by the more general phrase "information access technology."
Some observers saw Microsoft's recent move to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search & Transfer as a validation of the market. It will compete with a range of large vendors, such as Autonomy and FAST, along with a series of smaller companies, including Recommind and X1 Technologies.
"All the infrastructure vendors need to respond in some way to the need for effective search technology in their products," Andrews said in an interview on Thursday.
But it's unclear whether the market will see a rush of major consolidation, given the high cost of buying a top independent player, he said. (Autonomy has a market capitalization of US$4 billion, according to its Web site.) "At this point, what I've seen is that this is well short of a gold rush. ... It's not easy to see where this is going to go."
As for smaller players, Andrews said he is "fairly confident they're all looking to be acquired at this point. I think if they don't get bought, then they have to go highly specific."
Whatever path companies choose regarding enterprise search, they will face major challenges, chiefly the high expectations of users, Andrews noted in his presentation: "End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy."
Information itself will need to be organized and augmented to a greater degree, he states. "Critical issues include flexibility of indexing, incorporation of security down to the document level and, in rare cases, the subdocument level, and the flexibility to access APIs in business applications."
The general methodology for collecting search results will change as well, Andrews predicts.
"The classic model for information access technology is the spider, which travels around the threads of a document Web and returns with a picture of its structure ... However, this model demands that the data be somewhat stale, and it is not acceptable for transaction-sensitive business applications or the databases they feed and by which they are fed," he writes.
An emerging model, in Andrews' words, can be described as an ant: "Rather than traverse a document set and store a pattern of what it finds, the ant travels on well-known pathways to discover the 'freshest' morsel of data and return it to the colony where it can be merged with other such morsels for the good of the whole."
Andrews also predicted that:
Through the end of 2012, no Global 2000 enterprise will have standardized "absolutely" on a particular information access platform.
Business intelligence will work in concert with enterprise search at 90 percent of Global 2000 companies in 2012. "Absolute convergence between business intelligence and search applications will, typically, not occur, but business intelligence and search will work in tandem," he wrote. "However, a few exceptional vendors will emerge to provide a combined business intelligence and information access platform."
Thursday, April 10, 2008 2:20 PM PDT
Enterprise search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years, according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews.
"Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises" by the end of 2012, according to materials from a presentation Andrews gave at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo conference in Las Vegas this week. Gartner refers to enterprise search by the more general phrase "information access technology."
Some observers saw Microsoft's recent move to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search & Transfer as a validation of the market. It will compete with a range of large vendors, such as Autonomy and FAST, along with a series of smaller companies, including Recommind and X1 Technologies.
"All the infrastructure vendors need to respond in some way to the need for effective search technology in their products," Andrews said in an interview on Thursday.
But it's unclear whether the market will see a rush of major consolidation, given the high cost of buying a top independent player, he said. (Autonomy has a market capitalization of US$4 billion, according to its Web site.) "At this point, what I've seen is that this is well short of a gold rush. ... It's not easy to see where this is going to go."
As for smaller players, Andrews said he is "fairly confident they're all looking to be acquired at this point. I think if they don't get bought, then they have to go highly specific."
Whatever path companies choose regarding enterprise search, they will face major challenges, chiefly the high expectations of users, Andrews noted in his presentation: "End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy."
Information itself will need to be organized and augmented to a greater degree, he states. "Critical issues include flexibility of indexing, incorporation of security down to the document level and, in rare cases, the subdocument level, and the flexibility to access APIs in business applications."
The general methodology for collecting search results will change as well, Andrews predicts.
"The classic model for information access technology is the spider, which travels around the threads of a document Web and returns with a picture of its structure ... However, this model demands that the data be somewhat stale, and it is not acceptable for transaction-sensitive business applications or the databases they feed and by which they are fed," he writes.
An emerging model, in Andrews' words, can be described as an ant: "Rather than traverse a document set and store a pattern of what it finds, the ant travels on well-known pathways to discover the 'freshest' morsel of data and return it to the colony where it can be merged with other such morsels for the good of the whole."
Andrews also predicted that:
Through the end of 2012, no Global 2000 enterprise will have standardized "absolutely" on a particular information access platform.
Business intelligence will work in concert with enterprise search at 90 percent of Global 2000 companies in 2012. "Absolute convergence between business intelligence and search applications will, typically, not occur, but business intelligence and search will work in tandem," he wrote. "However, a few exceptional vendors will emerge to provide a combined business intelligence and information access platform."
PC World - Business Center: Gartner: Enterprise Search Pervasive by 2012
PC World - Business Center: Gartner: Enterprise Search Pervasive by 2012
Enterprise search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years, according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews.
"Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises" by the end of 2012, according to materials from a presentation Andrews gave at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo conference in Las Vegas this week. Gartner refers to enterprise search by the more general phrase "information access technology."
Some observers saw Microsoft's recent move to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search & Transfer as a validation of the market. It will compete with a range of large vendors, such as Autonomy and FAST, along with a series of smaller companies, including Recommind and X1 Technologies.
"All the infrastructure vendors need to respond in some way to the need for effective search technology in their products," Andrews said in an interview on Thursday.
But it's unclear whether the market will see a rush of major consolidation, given the high cost of buying a top independent player, he said. (Autonomy has a market capitalization of US$4 billion, according to its Web site.) "At this point, what I've seen is that this is well short of a gold rush. ... It's not easy to see where this is going to go."
As for smaller players, Andrews said he is "fairly confident they're all looking to be acquired at this point. I think if they don't get bought, then they have to go highly specific."
Whatever path companies choose regarding enterprise search, they will face major challenges, chiefly the high expectations of users, Andrews noted in his presentation: "End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy."
Information itself will need to be organized and augmented to a greater degree, he states. "Critical issues include flexibility of indexing, incorporation of security down to the document level and, in rare cases, the subdocument level, and the flexibility to access APIs in business applications."
The general methodology for collecting search results will change as well, Andrews predicts.
"The classic model for information access technology is the spider, which travels around the threads of a document Web and returns with a picture of its structure ... However, this model demands that the data be somewhat stale, and it is not acceptable for transaction-sensitive business applications or the databases they feed and by which they are fed," he writes.
An emerging model, in Andrews' words, can be described as an ant: "Rather than traverse a document set and store a pattern of what it finds, the ant travels on well-known pathways to discover the 'freshest' morsel of data and return it to the colony where it can be merged with other such morsels for the good of the whole."
Andrews also predicted that:
Through the end of 2012, no Global 2000 enterprise will have standardized "absolutely" on a particular information access platform.
Business intelligence will work in concert with enterprise search at 90 percent of Global 2000 companies in 2012. "Absolute convergence between business intelligence and search applications will, typically, not occur, but business intelligence and search will work in tandem," he wrote. "However, a few exceptional vendors will emerge to provide a combined business intelligence and information access platform."
Enterprise search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years, according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews.
"Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises" by the end of 2012, according to materials from a presentation Andrews gave at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo conference in Las Vegas this week. Gartner refers to enterprise search by the more general phrase "information access technology."
Some observers saw Microsoft's recent move to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search & Transfer as a validation of the market. It will compete with a range of large vendors, such as Autonomy and FAST, along with a series of smaller companies, including Recommind and X1 Technologies.
"All the infrastructure vendors need to respond in some way to the need for effective search technology in their products," Andrews said in an interview on Thursday.
But it's unclear whether the market will see a rush of major consolidation, given the high cost of buying a top independent player, he said. (Autonomy has a market capitalization of US$4 billion, according to its Web site.) "At this point, what I've seen is that this is well short of a gold rush. ... It's not easy to see where this is going to go."
As for smaller players, Andrews said he is "fairly confident they're all looking to be acquired at this point. I think if they don't get bought, then they have to go highly specific."
Whatever path companies choose regarding enterprise search, they will face major challenges, chiefly the high expectations of users, Andrews noted in his presentation: "End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy."
Information itself will need to be organized and augmented to a greater degree, he states. "Critical issues include flexibility of indexing, incorporation of security down to the document level and, in rare cases, the subdocument level, and the flexibility to access APIs in business applications."
The general methodology for collecting search results will change as well, Andrews predicts.
"The classic model for information access technology is the spider, which travels around the threads of a document Web and returns with a picture of its structure ... However, this model demands that the data be somewhat stale, and it is not acceptable for transaction-sensitive business applications or the databases they feed and by which they are fed," he writes.
An emerging model, in Andrews' words, can be described as an ant: "Rather than traverse a document set and store a pattern of what it finds, the ant travels on well-known pathways to discover the 'freshest' morsel of data and return it to the colony where it can be merged with other such morsels for the good of the whole."
Andrews also predicted that:
Through the end of 2012, no Global 2000 enterprise will have standardized "absolutely" on a particular information access platform.
Business intelligence will work in concert with enterprise search at 90 percent of Global 2000 companies in 2012. "Absolute convergence between business intelligence and search applications will, typically, not occur, but business intelligence and search will work in tandem," he wrote. "However, a few exceptional vendors will emerge to provide a combined business intelligence and information access platform."
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Enterprise tool halves Eversheds search time | 2 Apr 2008 | ComputerWeekly.com
Enterprise tool halves Eversheds search time | 2 Apr 2008 | ComputerWeekly.com
International law firm Eversheds is rolling out an enterprise search tool across its offices in the UK, Europe and Asia to around 4,000 users to save between 50% and 75% of time spent looking for information across internal and external sources.
International law firm Eversheds is rolling out an enterprise search tool across its offices in the UK, Europe and Asia to around 4,000 users to save between 50% and 75% of time spent looking for information across internal and external sources.
Monday, February 04, 2008
FT.com / Companies / UK - Autonomy up on subprime business lift
FT.com / Companies / UK - Autonomy up on subprime business lift
Autonomy up on subprime business lift
By Maija Palmer in London
Published: January 29 2008 23:55 | Last updated: January 29 2008 23:55
Shares in Autonomy rose 7 per cent after the search software company reported a 62 per cent rise in annual profits and said most of the world’s leading banks were considering using its software to prepare for lawsuits related to the US subprime mortgage crisis.
The Cambridge-based company held firm its forecast for 10-20 per cent growth in 2008 in spite of fears of a global slowdown.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, said: “We have not seen any effects of slowdown yet and even if there is a downturn, we feel comfortable with our estimates.
“We have very little exposure to consumer markets and the financial sector, and 90 per cent of our business is driven by regulatory requirements.”
He said that any slowdownwas likely to be offset by benefits from the subprime crisis, which is creating a new market for Autonomy’s software.
Autonomy’s technology allows companies to sift through unstructuredinformation such as e-mails, Word documents and even telephone call recordings, helping companies prepare for court cases.
Earlier this year, Autonomy signed a $70m (£35m) deal – by far its biggest contract to date – with Citigroup as the bank wrote off more than $18bn in subprime-related losses and braced itself for potential investor lawsuits.
Mr Lynch said: “Every other major bank – barring one or two exceptions – has the same problem and most of the top-name banks are in the process of doing something with us.
“A lot of organisations are having to spend money quickly.”
Revenues for the year to the end of December rose 37 per cent to $343.5m while pre-tax profits rose to $91.4m from $56.3m the previous year, beating analysts’ estimates. Earnings per share rose from 8 cents to 11 cents.
Revenues were boosted by the acquisition of Zantaz, but Autonomy also registered 20 per cent revenue growth for its core IDOL software as it signed deals with companies such as China Mobile, AT&T and Morgan Stanley and organisations such as the US airforce, Nasa and Nato.
Shares in the company, which have gained nearly 57 per cent over the past year, rose 61p to 906p.
FT Comment
● Barbershops and funeral parlours are generally seen as recession-proof businesses, and to this list we could consider adding Autonomy – which is as close to recession-resistant as it gets in the technology sector. Businesses have to be able to find documents amid their ever-increasing mountains of electronic data – this is not discretionary spending – and if they get sued, they have to find them even quicker. Market concerns have taken a little shine off the shares in the past month and left them looking attractive at about 30 times this year’s earnings estimates.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Autonomy up on subprime business lift
By Maija Palmer in London
Published: January 29 2008 23:55 | Last updated: January 29 2008 23:55
Shares in Autonomy rose 7 per cent after the search software company reported a 62 per cent rise in annual profits and said most of the world’s leading banks were considering using its software to prepare for lawsuits related to the US subprime mortgage crisis.
The Cambridge-based company held firm its forecast for 10-20 per cent growth in 2008 in spite of fears of a global slowdown.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, said: “We have not seen any effects of slowdown yet and even if there is a downturn, we feel comfortable with our estimates.
“We have very little exposure to consumer markets and the financial sector, and 90 per cent of our business is driven by regulatory requirements.”
He said that any slowdownwas likely to be offset by benefits from the subprime crisis, which is creating a new market for Autonomy’s software.
Autonomy’s technology allows companies to sift through unstructuredinformation such as e-mails, Word documents and even telephone call recordings, helping companies prepare for court cases.
Earlier this year, Autonomy signed a $70m (£35m) deal – by far its biggest contract to date – with Citigroup as the bank wrote off more than $18bn in subprime-related losses and braced itself for potential investor lawsuits.
Mr Lynch said: “Every other major bank – barring one or two exceptions – has the same problem and most of the top-name banks are in the process of doing something with us.
“A lot of organisations are having to spend money quickly.”
Revenues for the year to the end of December rose 37 per cent to $343.5m while pre-tax profits rose to $91.4m from $56.3m the previous year, beating analysts’ estimates. Earnings per share rose from 8 cents to 11 cents.
Revenues were boosted by the acquisition of Zantaz, but Autonomy also registered 20 per cent revenue growth for its core IDOL software as it signed deals with companies such as China Mobile, AT&T and Morgan Stanley and organisations such as the US airforce, Nasa and Nato.
Shares in the company, which have gained nearly 57 per cent over the past year, rose 61p to 906p.
FT Comment
● Barbershops and funeral parlours are generally seen as recession-proof businesses, and to this list we could consider adding Autonomy – which is as close to recession-resistant as it gets in the technology sector. Businesses have to be able to find documents amid their ever-increasing mountains of electronic data – this is not discretionary spending – and if they get sued, they have to find them even quicker. Market concerns have taken a little shine off the shares in the past month and left them looking attractive at about 30 times this year’s earnings estimates.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
FT.com / In depth - Google weighs in against Microsoft
FT.com / In depth - Google weighs in against Microsoft
Google weighs in against Microsoft
By Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Published: February 3 2008 19:54 | Last updated: February 4 2008 03:17
Google raised a red flag over Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo, on Sunday arguing it could open the way for the software developer to extend its PC monopoly to the internet.
The intervention is the latest example of the growing enmity between the two companies and echoes Microsoft’s denunciation of Google’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.
While Microsoft claimed that deal could give Google inordinate power to control online advertisements as they become the lifeblood of many internet companies, Google believes Microsoft would be in a position to influence the evolution of the web itself.
However, Brad Smith, general counsel of Microsoft, said: “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the internet.”
Microsoft has not ruled out launching a proxy fight for control of Yahoo by 13 March, the last date it can nominate its own directors to the company’s board ahead of this year’s shareholders’ meeting.
Separately, an alliance with Google is being seen inside Yahoo as one of the main options as the company tries to fight off Microsoft’s unsolicited approach, according to one person familiar with its thinking.
Yahoo rejected the idea of a tie-up with Google last year but has now put it back at the top of its list of options, along with finding ways to realise more of the value from its stakes in Japanese and Chinese joint ventures, according to this person.
The possibility of an alliance between the two internet groups adds to the intrigue surrounding the tussle between Google and Microsoft, and could raise questions about Google’s motivations in publicly attacking Microsoft now.
In a posting on Google’s company blog, David Drummond, its top lawyer, said: “While the internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies – and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
He went on to question whether a Yahoo acquisition would allow Microsoft, “despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offences, to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the internet”.
Google swung the spotlight on to the “overwhelming” share of the web e-mail and instant messaging markets that Microsoft and Yahoo account for, plus the fact that they own two of the busiest web portals.
“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ e-mail, IM, and web-based services?” Mr Drummond asked.
Meanwhile, a Google-Yahoo alliance, something discussed but not pursued last year, would enable Google to halt Microsoft’s latest bid to boost its standing on the web.
The idea was receiving serious consideration again this weekend as Yahoo looked at a wider range of options, according to a person close to the company.
Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo was worth $43bn at the end of last week.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Google weighs in against Microsoft
By Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Published: February 3 2008 19:54 | Last updated: February 4 2008 03:17
Google raised a red flag over Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo, on Sunday arguing it could open the way for the software developer to extend its PC monopoly to the internet.
The intervention is the latest example of the growing enmity between the two companies and echoes Microsoft’s denunciation of Google’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.
While Microsoft claimed that deal could give Google inordinate power to control online advertisements as they become the lifeblood of many internet companies, Google believes Microsoft would be in a position to influence the evolution of the web itself.
However, Brad Smith, general counsel of Microsoft, said: “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the internet.”
Microsoft has not ruled out launching a proxy fight for control of Yahoo by 13 March, the last date it can nominate its own directors to the company’s board ahead of this year’s shareholders’ meeting.
Separately, an alliance with Google is being seen inside Yahoo as one of the main options as the company tries to fight off Microsoft’s unsolicited approach, according to one person familiar with its thinking.
Yahoo rejected the idea of a tie-up with Google last year but has now put it back at the top of its list of options, along with finding ways to realise more of the value from its stakes in Japanese and Chinese joint ventures, according to this person.
The possibility of an alliance between the two internet groups adds to the intrigue surrounding the tussle between Google and Microsoft, and could raise questions about Google’s motivations in publicly attacking Microsoft now.
In a posting on Google’s company blog, David Drummond, its top lawyer, said: “While the internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies – and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
He went on to question whether a Yahoo acquisition would allow Microsoft, “despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offences, to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the internet”.
Google swung the spotlight on to the “overwhelming” share of the web e-mail and instant messaging markets that Microsoft and Yahoo account for, plus the fact that they own two of the busiest web portals.
“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ e-mail, IM, and web-based services?” Mr Drummond asked.
Meanwhile, a Google-Yahoo alliance, something discussed but not pursued last year, would enable Google to halt Microsoft’s latest bid to boost its standing on the web.
The idea was receiving serious consideration again this weekend as Yahoo looked at a wider range of options, according to a person close to the company.
Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo was worth $43bn at the end of last week.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Subprime boost for Autonomy
FT.com / Companies / IT - Subprime boost for Autonomy
Subprime boost for Autonomy
By Maija Palmer, Technology Correspondent
Published: October 24 2007 03:16 | Last updated: October 24 2007 03:16
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, said the search and archiving company could see a boost to business next year if financial services groups started facing litigation over their exposure to US subprime home loans.
The company provides software that helps companies retrieve e-mails and other electronic records and said its systems were often used by companies preparing for lawsuits. Autonomy increased its exposure to the legal market earlier this year with the $375m acquisition of Zantaz, which supplies nine of the world’s top 10 law firms.
Mr Lynch said the company had won new customers “all along the financial services chain” who were preparing for litigation related to the subprime problems. The company also supplies software to the New York Stock Exchange and the Serious Fraud Office.
“It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good,” said Mr Lynch.
However, shares in Autonomy fell 44p to 911p as it reported third-quarter results in line with estimates.
Revenues were up 49 per cent at $89.6m for the three months to the end of September, while pre-tax profits rose 38 per cent to $18.3m.
Roger Phillips, analyst at Evolution Securities, cut the stock from “add” to “reduce” and said: “There were no horrors in this. Autonomy have repeatedly beat expectations and this time they are in line. But the stock is just too expensive – to maintain the valuation you need constant outperformance.”
Autonomy also announced the acquisition of Meridio for £20m ($40m) in cash and shares.
FT Comment
●Autonomy shares have doubled over the past year and trade at 50 times this year’s earnings estimates – well above the rest of the software sector. It is natural for the market to worry about whether this is justified and panic at any sign of weakness. Autonomy’s revenues rely on selling big licences to big companies and this may slow in a downturn, while eventually it may face market saturation. However, there is little sign of that yet and in spite of there being little in the latest results to propel the shares higher, Tuesday’s correction looks overdone.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Subprime boost for Autonomy
By Maija Palmer, Technology Correspondent
Published: October 24 2007 03:16 | Last updated: October 24 2007 03:16
Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, said the search and archiving company could see a boost to business next year if financial services groups started facing litigation over their exposure to US subprime home loans.
The company provides software that helps companies retrieve e-mails and other electronic records and said its systems were often used by companies preparing for lawsuits. Autonomy increased its exposure to the legal market earlier this year with the $375m acquisition of Zantaz, which supplies nine of the world’s top 10 law firms.
Mr Lynch said the company had won new customers “all along the financial services chain” who were preparing for litigation related to the subprime problems. The company also supplies software to the New York Stock Exchange and the Serious Fraud Office.
“It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good,” said Mr Lynch.
However, shares in Autonomy fell 44p to 911p as it reported third-quarter results in line with estimates.
Revenues were up 49 per cent at $89.6m for the three months to the end of September, while pre-tax profits rose 38 per cent to $18.3m.
Roger Phillips, analyst at Evolution Securities, cut the stock from “add” to “reduce” and said: “There were no horrors in this. Autonomy have repeatedly beat expectations and this time they are in line. But the stock is just too expensive – to maintain the valuation you need constant outperformance.”
Autonomy also announced the acquisition of Meridio for £20m ($40m) in cash and shares.
FT Comment
●Autonomy shares have doubled over the past year and trade at 50 times this year’s earnings estimates – well above the rest of the software sector. It is natural for the market to worry about whether this is justified and panic at any sign of weakness. Autonomy’s revenues rely on selling big licences to big companies and this may slow in a downturn, while eventually it may face market saturation. However, there is little sign of that yet and in spite of there being little in the latest results to propel the shares higher, Tuesday’s correction looks overdone.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Autonomy bietet Suchtechnologie für Microsofts Sharepoint Server 2007
Autonomy bietet Suchtechnologie für Microsofts Sharepoint Server 2007
Autonomy, ein Unternehmen der Suchtechnologie für Großunternehmen, stellt den IDOL-Server jetzt für Kunden von Microsofts SharePoint Server 2007 zur Verfügung. Mit über 500 erweiterten Funktionen als SharePoint Web Parts bietet IDOL jetzt eine flexible Grundlage für die unternehmensweite Verarbeitung strukturierter und unstrukturierter Daten. Die Technologie von Autonomy verfügt über ein konzeptionelles und textuelles Verständnis für jegliche Art von elektronischen Daten und ermöglicht damit die Suche nach Informationen in Texten, E-Mails, Audio- oder Videodateien.
Autonomy, ein Unternehmen der Suchtechnologie für Großunternehmen, stellt den IDOL-Server jetzt für Kunden von Microsofts SharePoint Server 2007 zur Verfügung. Mit über 500 erweiterten Funktionen als SharePoint Web Parts bietet IDOL jetzt eine flexible Grundlage für die unternehmensweite Verarbeitung strukturierter und unstrukturierter Daten. Die Technologie von Autonomy verfügt über ein konzeptionelles und textuelles Verständnis für jegliche Art von elektronischen Daten und ermöglicht damit die Suche nach Informationen in Texten, E-Mails, Audio- oder Videodateien.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Autonomy Buys Zantaz To Beef Up Enterprise Archival Searching -- Autonomy Corp. -- InformationWeek
Autonomy Buys Zantaz To Beef Up Enterprise Archival Searching -- Autonomy Corp. -- InformationWeek
Autonomy is buying the e-mail archiving firm for $375 million.
Autonomy is buying the e-mail archiving firm for $375 million.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Thursday, April 05, 2007
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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