Miles Kehoe has already taken a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on our own Enterprise Search sector. I’ve written before on how I don’t think open source solutions are particularly well treated by the large analyst firms, as they often focus on vendors only. The world has somewhat changed though and five of the seventeen vendors mentioned are using a base of open source technology, so at least some of this major part of the market is covered.

However the problem remains that the MQ ignores a great deal of the enterprise search sector: it doesn’t cover Sharepoint with its FAST-derived search facility, Oracle’s Endeca (which apparently is now no longer available as a standalone product, a surprise to me), Funnelback (which is again incorrectly labelled as open source – it’s the Squiz CMS software that’s open source, not the search engine they bought) or the rising star of Elasticsearch. If you were new to the sector you might conclude that none of these options are available to you. Gartner itself says “This Magic Quadrant introduces search managers and information architects in end-user organizations to the range of enterprise search vendors they can choose from” – but this range is severely and artificially restricted.

Let’s hope that the analyst firms take note of some of this bad press – perhaps it’s time to change approach, be more open about biases and methodologies, and stop producing hugely oversimplified diagrams to characterise complex and deep business sectors.

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Next I chaired the Open Source track, where we started with Cedric Ulmer of France Labs, who talked about a search application they built for a consultancy business with around 40 employees. Using Apache Solr, Apache ManifoldCF and their own Datafari open source framework they turned this project around very quickly – interestingly, the end clients needed no training to use the new system, which implies a very well designed UI. Our second talk from Ronald Hobbs of Reed Business International described a project on a much larger scale: 100 million documents, 72 business units and up to 190 queries per second – this was originally served by the FAST ESP engine but they moved to an Apache Solr system, replacing the FAST processing pipeline with Search Technologies Aspire project. His five steps for an effective migration (Prepare, Get the right tools, Get the right team, Migrate in chunks, Clean up) I can only agree with from our own experience of such projects, including one from FAST ESP to Solr. I was amused by his description of the Apache Zookeeper project as ‘a bipolar manic depressive’, although it seemed this was eventually overcome with a successful deployment on Amazon EC2. Next was Galina Hinova of Intrafind on a aftersales search application for MAN Truck and Bus – again at serious scale (MAN have around 1 billion vehicles in existence with 100-150 documents related to each). Interestingly the Euro6 regulations for emissions and standardized EU terms for automobile parts were direct drivers of the project, with Apache Lucene as the base technology. No longer is open source search just for small-scale projects it seems!

After a short break during which I chatted to John Newton, founder of Documentum Alfresco, and his team we returned to hear Dan Jackson give a description of how UCL had improved their website search – with a chaotic mix of low quality content and an ‘awful’ content management system, the challenges were myriad but with the help of experts such as our associate Tony Russell-Rose they have made significant improvements. Next was what was to prove a very popular talk from Nick Brown of AstraZeneca on a huge, well funded project to build applications to support research and development – again, this was at large scale with 75 million documents (including ‘all the patents and all the research papers’). The key here was their creation of many well-targeted ‘apps’ to enable particular uses of the Sinequa search engine they chose for the back end, including mobile apps to help find others in the company (or external to it) who are also working on a particular drug or disease. This presentation showed just what can be achieved if companies really understand the potential of search technology – knowledge sharing and discovery of previously unknown information.

After a short drinks reception we retired to a nearby pub for the combined Cambridge and London Search Meetup – I’d prepared a short quiz (feel free to have a go!) which was won by Tony Russell-Rose’s team. Networking and chatting continued long into the evening, with some people from the wider UK search community also attending.

To be continued! You can see most of the slides here.

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• Search isn’t seen as essential. If your accounting software goes down, nobody gets paid: but if the search engine has gradually degraded in accuracy, doesn’t always contain the most recent documents and is generally too hard to use then most of your users will try and find a way around it – they’ll Google for content on the corporate website, dig slowly through the filestores or call up a colleague to ask. Of course, all of this will take time and there’s the risk they won’t find anything useful (or worse, find something inaccurate or out-of-date), but time is only money, surely?
• The magic has gone. The sharp suited salesman who told you all the magical things your search engine could do – it could understand concepts, human language and the meaning of life – is a distant memory. Somehow those magical features were never implemented, perhaps the unexpected extra cost put you off (surely the magic came as standard? No?). You’ve also probably turned off a lot of the clever features of your engine as either no-one could understand how to use them, or they affected performance so much that search results took minutes to appear.
• Upgrading search is hard and expensive. Small changes to the existing engine can cost huge consultancy fees but if you change supplier, you’ll have a whole new team of salesmen to meet, lots more buzzwords to learn, there’s expensive new license fees to pay, you’ll also have to overhaul your content management system, your metadata, your front ends…better to leave everything alone, surely?

There are search engines out there, chugging away quietly behind a corporate firewall, whose antiquity would astonish. Any chance of a support contract has long gone as the supplier would prefer it if you upgraded to their latest-and-greatest version – that’s if the supplier still exists at all. However there is always a way to upgrade that reduces the risk and cost – an incremental, agile and open-source based approach will prevent future lock-in to a single supplier and give you more control of the code your search engine depends on. Recently we’ve used this approach to help clients successfully upgrade search applications based on dtSearch, FAST ESP and Oracle and in the near future we’ll be doing the same for clients with several other well-known engines – and a few lost in the mists of time!

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We’ve talked to a number of clients over the last month or so who are determined to move away from Autonomy IDOL itself, citing reasons such as a lack of ownership of code (so even tiny changes to a user interface need to be carried out by expensive consultants), scaling being difficult and expensive, and indifferent support even after the HP acquisition. As I wrote at the time moving from one closed-source technology to another doesn’t really reduce any risk that your supplier will change their roadmap, prices or corporate strategy to your disadvantage.

Perhaps it’s time to cut the strings and take control of your search.

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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.

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One can’t deny that the search market is going through some huge changes at the moment. Larger vendors are being acquired which can lead to some major (and not always welcome) changes in the product, pricing and service. Smaller vendors are finding it increasingly hard to compete with the plethora of powerful open source solutions (we’ve heard rumours of prices of closed source solutions being dropped radically to attempt to secure new business). There are also some interesting moves towards more comprehensive Business Intelligence and Unified Access solutions, such as Attivio.

I don’t think enterprise search is dying as a market or an offering, simply changing – and hopefully for the better, into an era of more realistic pricing, solutions that actually work (rather than promising ‘magic’) and more openness in terms of the technology and capability.

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However the reaction isn’t all positive – the FT implies this deal is at the “lunatic end of the valuation spectrum”. Law Technology News says “Autonomy’s e-discovery revenue stream is high-end but unsustainable” and quotes users of the system with problems: “We had a lot of issues with the applications crashing, the documents tending not to get checked in”….””[Autonomy sales staff] were pricey, arrogant, and they couldn’t care less about us. … It cannot get any worse.”.

HP will have to work hard to integrate Autonomy into both its corporate culture and software frameworks – a problem currently faced by Microsoft since its acquisition of FAST a short while ago. Stephen Arnold thinks this process will be “risky”. What it means for the rest of the search sector is harder to guess, although Martin White of Intranet Focus says this deal indicates HP can see a “future in search applications” and, interestingly, “A number of privately-held search vendors are probably working out what their valuation would be”.

My view is that this is just the latest of huge shifts in the enterprise search market, partly spurred on by the rise of open source options and the gradual realisation that the huge license fees charged by some vendors may be unsustainable. I don’t think Autonomy will be the last company looking for a safe haven in the years to come.

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“In these rapidly changing times we don’t know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it’s important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data volumes that may not scale linearly. Maintaining control over the future of your search software is also key. Open source search has come of age and every modern business should be aware of its advantages.”

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However, if you migrate from one closed source solution to another, how can you guarantee that the same sort of events that have led to the current situation won’t happen again? With open source, there’s no vendor lock-in, a wide choice of companies to assist you with development an integration, a wealth of different support options and of course no license fees to pay. Migrating from FAST is a common topic at conferences at the moment – read Jan Høydahl’s presentation, or see Michael McIntosh’s video. There are even open source document processing pipeline frameworks to replace the popular FAST one, and we’ve been evaluating some alternative language processing frameworks. Scaling isn’t an issue and some cases you could significantly reduce your hardware budget.

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I’m looking forward to returning to the UK with all I’ve learnt from this event, and to follow up on some of the ideas generated – for example, it would be great to be able to demonstrate Lucid Works Enterprise to interested parties in London.

Thanks to Stephen Arnold’s team and all at Lucid Imagination for organising such a great conference. It won’t be the last I’m sure!

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