I notice this morning that Autonomy have created a rescue program for those unhappy with Microsoft's decision to offer FAST search only as part of Sharepoint - slightly late to the party, considering this had been long predicted. Last year it was Autonomy...Continue reading
2012 has been a fascinating and stormy year for those of us in the search business. We've seen a raft of further acquisitions of commercial closed source search companies by bigger players, some convinced that what used to be called Enterprise Search is now a solution to Big Data (like Stephen Arnold we wonder what will succeed Big Data as the next marketing term - I love his phrase "In a quest for revenue, the vendo...Continue reading
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 Continue reading
Last Thursday I spent the day at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event, run by their Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Unlike some events I could mention, this isn't a forum for sales pitches, over-inflated claims or business speak - just some great presentations on all aspects of search and some lively networking or discussion. It's one of my favourite events of t...Continue reading
I'm not going to comment on the various financial aspects of the recent news about HP's write-down of the value of its Autonomy acquisition - others are able to do this far better than me - but I would urge anyone interested to re-read the documents Oracle released earlier this year. However, I am going to write about the IDOL technology itself (I'd ...Continue reading
This morning the largest open source search project, Apache Lucene/Solr, released a new version with a raft of new features. We've been advising clients to consider version 4.0 for several months now, as the alpha and beta versions have become available, and we know of several already running this version on live sites. Here's a few highlights:
I visited Enterprise Search Europe for the first day only last week, and caught a number of the presentations as well as giving one of my own (which I won't discuss here but you'll hear more about over the next few weeks). First up was Paul Doscher of Lucid Imagination with a lively presentation discussing whether search...Continue reading
I spent yesterday morning at Ovum's briefing on Enterprise Search, and they kindly invited me to sit on a discussion panel. One of the more controversial topics raised by analyst Mike Davis was 'Is Enterprise Search dead?' which provoked some lively discussion. We also heard from Tyler Tate of Twigkit on Search UX, Exalead on Search Based Applications and Continue reading
The blogotweetosphere has been positively buzzing since last night's announcement that Hewlett Packard will be buying Autonomy for £7.1bn, while divesting itself of its PC business. Many commentators have put a positive spin on this, pointing to Autonomy's meteoric rise from a small office in Cambridge to the behemoth it is today....Continue reading
This week I was passed a link to a European Commission report on the Enterprise Search market, which I've just finished ploughing through (it's 123 pages and not exactly light reading). It provides an overview of the history of the market and some current trends, but sadly misses out almost completely the rapidly growing open source sector. The authors say "...open source solutions have been disregarded because they do n...Continue reading
