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Raul Valdes-Perez

Enterprise Search Grows Up

In parallel with our release of Velocity version 5.5, we at Vivisimo have been speaking with a number of analysts and journalists (e.g., InformationWeek, ComputerWorld). My own comments have focused on two thoughts about the state of enterprise search.

This post focuses on the first thought: enterprise search has grown up. That is, enterprise search has reached a state of development that makes possible the speedy deployment and painless ongoing administration of a search engine that handles the full complexity of enterprises and delivers a great end-user experience. A little elaboration:

  1. speedy deployment means days or weeks, not many months or years
  2. painless administration: all done through a web browser instead of custom software development using APIs
  3. handle full enterprise complexity, such as connectivity to repositories, working within the pre-existing security framework, and leveraging rich meta-data and other semi-structured textual information
  4. a great user experience with rich but intuitive navigation tools for the knowledge worker

This constellation of properties has been absent from enterprise search before now, which instead featured enterprise heartbreaks: long deployments with endless vendor professional services, custom programming to do even simple things like federated search, clunky user experiences, bad ranking, and the rest. Search is not now perfect, but has definitely matured into a responsible grownup instead of an insufferable brat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Discussion

  1. February 13th, 2007, at 10:19 pm # John Smith wrote:

    I don’t know what real Enterprise Search projects you’ve worked on lately. But those of us who do this for a living would like to know where you get “speedy deployment and painless ongoing administration of a search engine that handles the full complexity of enterprises and delivers a great end-user experience.”

    This is just another example of a vendor making claims not substantiated in the real world. Don’t worry, you all do it. Funny to read entries like this because you know that most talk like this is NEVER for real.

  2. February 14th, 2007, at 4:45 pm # Raul Valdes-Perez wrote:

    Well, it’s OK to be skeptical if your experience with enterprise
    search has been the opposite.

    The installation and ongoing administration of Velocity can be done through a web browser; the administrator isn’t forced into custom software development using APIs. Much of the enterprise complexity is handled by point-and-click from menus.

    Concerning speedy deployment, it does take two to tango. The customer
    needs to have well-defined goals, technical requirements, and so on.
    In our experience, these organizational issues, plus the overhead of
    typical large-organization decision cycles, are a major contributor
    of delays.

    But you don’t need to believe us. Check out this independent
    Infoworld review by Mike Heck, who actually installs and tests products:

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/08/37TCvelocity_1.html

    and read remarks like these:

    “In approximately 30 minutes I’d installed Velocity 5 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Vivísimo consolidated some of the management functions and reorganized parts of the Web administration interface, which compressed down to a few hours the process of creating my test scenarios — searching an intranet, external Web sites, two SharePoint portals, and several Microsoft SQL databases. More elaborate customizations required a few days.”

    The world does sometimes get better.

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