Denis’ Blog

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.

I will hold two presentations in Paris next Wednesday. One will be on Enterprise 2.0 and the other on Enterprise Search. Feel free to join, the access is free if registered. I will present our return on experience on Enterprise 2.0 especially with social tagging and bottom-up self organizing communities of practices. For entreprise search, I will present the state of the art of the new holy grail: finding the information you are looking for.

It’s done. Microsoft today announced that they bid on Fast Search & Transfer. FAST is public and Microsoft has still almost 60% to acquire on the market, but I am confident they will.

This is great news:

1. Now the position of Microsoft in the Gartner Magic Quadrant will be justified . No seriously the enter of MS at this position in 2006 was..well..very optimistic. Call that anticipation…. Whatever the problems of FAST have been, this is a good technology, a technology that delivers. With the raising success of MOSS 2007, Microsoft will now be able to find needles in haystacks
2. They offer a 43% premium. I hope you read my previous post on the subject .
3. Autonomy stock price soared of 10%, and this is not over. I really hope you read that post. :-). More than that, this news is a very good news for Autonomy. It confirmed it is a very potential targets AND it will help Autonomy to consolidate on the short term its position on the high end market.
4. This will accelerate the idea that Enterprise Search is now an important topic. Say bye bye the Search Engine OEM in portals, bye bye to poor search abilities in ECM. Microsoft will push hard and will now attack Filenet and Documentum in the middle-end ECM market, Google in the Enterprise Search space.

Now let’s analyze what could happen:

• Google will have to accelerate. The Google GSA still lakes key Enterprise grade features like mapped security, usable clustering and business vocabularies management features. It is time to deliver for Google if they want to win more that Mini and GSA to index a few To of HTML
• Small players will have to react: Coveo or Sinequa were betting a lot on the MOSS 2007 integration. Well, I guess they will have now more difficult relationships with MS :-).
• “Visionaries” players like Exalead, Vivisimo or Endeca have a good opportunity to position themselves as the last independent players. It will be tough since on the low end Google is there, and on the high end Autonomy and FAST are confirmed as established leaders.
• IBM will strengthen its offer. I do not see another acquisition for them in that field. They are late, but their recent involvement in the UIMA open project tends to demonstrate that they will adopt the same strategy as the one they executed with Eclipse/Websphere Application Designer
• Oracle and SAP will have to move. Autonomy? Endeca?

I would bet Endeca acquired by Oracle and Autonomy by SAP. Only one beer on it. What do you think?