Denis’ Blog

I will give a presentation June, 12th, on Saas, on demand and open source at SIgestion 2008, a big trade show dedicated to Business & IT. Feel free to join, Saas & Open Source, that’s pretty hot topics nowadays. BTW, thanks to some of my readers for the opportunity .

Forrester released today their new report on Enterprise Search. They are ranking Autonomy, Endeca, FAST and Vivisimo as the leaders in this space. That’s pretty consistent with what we’ve seen in the last months . And congrats to Vivisimo to enter the leader quadrant. Where I am more surprised is that Forrester did not evaluated Exalead. Exalead is demonstrating exceptional performance on huge volume, a neat architecture and a great value for the price. Don’t see it as a “we push the frenchies” post. Customers serious about search must also evaluate Exalead.

Using open source as a distribution model is a very efficient strategy when well executed. Alfresco in the DMS/ECM world has been taking incredible market shares in just 2 years, as MySQL did in the RDBMs world. Many domains have now their open source challenger: Montavista in the embedded World, Digium with Asterisk in VOIP/e-pbx, Hyperic and GroundWork in the Monitoring, Funambol in the mobile/telco industry, Pentaho in BI or OpenBravo in ERP.

In the Enterprise search space, two companies have demonstrated a clear strategy leveraging an open source model:

• IBM, with Omnifind! Yahoo Edition are also leveraging open source with an entry-level solution. But like IBM is doing with Websphere Express (Geronimo based) and Websphere, that is not a real offer? That’s a teaser to have a foot in the door and to push Omnifind.
• More interesting, SearchBlox is proposing a great value proposal around Lucene and the Carrot Clustered Search Engine. But Lucene lakes enterprise grade features like mapped security and a whole bunch of connectors.

And that’s where come Dieselpoint. Dieselpoint has announced today the launch of OpenPipelines . The future will tell if they are serious in their execution. They know well the enterprise search market and will propose a nice mix of features. But this move from Dieselpoint seems to be a defensive one. In a challenged market (Google Mindshare, FAST/Microsoft/Search 2008, Autonomy leadership, dozens of serious competitors), and given that Dieselpoint has already a technology, this move is not a full open source strategy like Alfresco’s one. It is maybe more a move like the one of CA opensourcing Ingres: I am challenged, I am loosing market share, let’s rejuvenate the beast with an open source sticker :-). I am probably too sarcastic. Intalio in the BPM world has demonstrated that you can leverage open source to go from a 100% proprietary strategy to a “blended” one like our friends of BEA used to say. Wait & See.

So we stay with an open question: who will propose an enterprise grade solution with a full open source distribution model. Enterprise Search is very similar to RDBMs:

• the dual-licencing strategy works, with the right licencing an enterprise search open source company can boost OEM.
• it is a product thousands of consultants and integrators are looking for every day for they application and projects. The bottom-up, low cost sales strategy well described be Matt from Alfresco will perfectly work.
• Established leaders (Autonomy, Google) will be more than challenged with the move

The thing is that in Enterprise Search, unlike DMS or RDBMs, there is key Intellectual Property in the motor. Algorithms are key in the value proposal. At least for now. So moving to open source can be touchy. But given the market trend to commoditization and the strong position of IS leaders (IBM, Microsoft and Oracle), I am convinced that we will see in the next 12 months some pretty aggressive move in enterprise search space towards open source distribution model.

Now the question is. Who will do it? Coveo? Exalead? Intellisearch? Sinequa? Vivisimo?

Take your bet.