Although there’s a raft of new features, most of them have been introduced by the GSA’s competitors over the last few years or are available as open source (entity recognition or document preview for example). The GSA is also not a particularly cheap option as commentators including Stephen Arnold have noticed: we’ve had clients tell us of six-figure license fees for reasonably sized collections of a few millions of documents – and that’s for two years, after which time you have to buy it again. Not surprisingly some people have migrated to other solutions.

However there’s another question that seems to have been missed by Google’s strategists: how a physical appliance can compete with cloud-based search. I can’t think of a single prospective client over the last year or so who hasn’t considered this latter option on both cost and scalability grounds (and we’ll shortly be able to talk about a very large client who have chosen this route). Although there may well be a hard core of GSA customers who want a real box in reassuring Google yellow, one wonders why Google haven’t considered a ‘virtual’ GSA to compete with Amazon’s CloudSearch amongst others.

It will be interesting to see if this version of the GSA is the last…

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