More on the Enterprise Search Summit

ESS - more thoughts

Expect more vendor consolidation, and there are many instances of it already:

* Autonomy bought Verity (an oil-and-water team, IMHO).
* Oracle bought TripleHop (great product that combined Autonomy’s statistical search with Verity’s keyword approach).

Not only that, but due to the "camel's nose in the tent" phenomenon, if you've already picked a major vendor that you trust for a major collection of services (Microsoft for ASP/email/Visual Source Safe... or Oracle for databases....) you may be tempted to go with that vendor's search solution --for better or for worse. Doing that will lock you in for a long time. Vendors may see "search" as a way to lock you into their other more profitable solutions.

Enterprise Search Symposium

Well, it's been about a month since I attended this conference in NYC. I wanted to let my first impressions sink in before relaying my conclusions about enterprise search and this conference. After a month, I have to say I am as ambivilant in many of my conclusions as I was in May. Here are some of those conclusions.

First, the conference was surprisingly well attended. I'd estimate there were from 800-900 attendees, way above the total last year (I'm told). So maybe this finally is the year of Enterprise search. On the other hand, several conference presentors reminded us that IBM developed enterprise search software in the mid 1960s --that's right, about 40 years ago-- and the fundamental capabilities haven't changed a whole lot. Moreover, the market for enterprise search is less than a billion dollars, a relatively small size. So is this the year Enterprise search finally takes off? Or is this a little like Lucy's football?

More thoughts on the way this week.