It hasn’t taken long for some of Autonomy’s rivals to attempt to capitalise on the recent bad PR around HP’s acquisition – OpenText has offered a ‘software trade-in’, Recommind has offered a ‘trade-up’ and Swiss company RSD has offered a free license for their governance software to Autonomy customers. No word yet from Exalead, Oracle (Endeca), Microsoft (FAST) or any of the other big commercial search companies but I’m sure their salespeople are making the most of the situation.
Migrating a search engine from one technology to another is rarely trouble-free: data must be re-indexed, query architectures rewritten, integration with external systems re-done, relevancy checked…however with sufficient forethought it can be done successfully. We’ve just helped one client migrate from a commercial engine to Apache Solr in a matter of weeks: although at first glance Solr didn’t seem to support all of the features the commercial engine provided, it proved possible to simulate them using multiple queries and with careful design for scalability, query performance is comparable.
Choosing one closed source engine to replace another doesn’t remove the risk that future corporate mergers & acquisitions will cause exactly the same lack of confidence that is no doubt affecting Autonomy customers – or huge increases in license fees, a drop in the quality of available support or the end of the product line altogether – and we’ve heard of all of these effects over the last few years. Moving to an open source search engine gives you freedom and control of the future of the technology your business is reliant upon, with a wealth of options for migration assistance, development and support.
So here’s our offer – we’d be happy to talk, for free (by phone or face-to-face for customers within reach of our Cambridge offices), to any Autonomy customers considering migration and to help them consider the open source options (some of these even have the Bayesian, probabilistic search features Autonomy IDOL provides) – and together with our partners we can also provide a level of ongoing support comparable to any closed source vendor. We don’t have salespeople, we don’t have a product to sell you and you’ll be talking directly to experts with decades of experience implementing search – and there’s no obligation to take things any further. We’d simply like to offer an alternative (and we believe, safer) route to effective search.
