Enterprise search companies distracted by content management?
Last week, Autonomy (arguably the enterprise search leader) acquired Interwoven. My reaction is somewhat mixed about this. If the search industry truly is moving toward a merger of the functions of content management and search (as suggested by this merger and this article from cnet), I’m not sure this is a good thing.
Powerful tools are important
The tools that companies like Autonomy and Endeca both offer are extremely powerful search and information discovery tools. The types of tool a company can build with these products, and the capabilities they can bring to an organization, are very specialized and yet vital to many projects and operations in an organization with many knowledge workers. Being able to offer the users in an organization tools that, for example, automatically alert them to new and relevant content – and do it well, or tools that help visualize and summarize information, are extremely important capabilities. Building and refining the tools that do this – especially ‘off net’ where Google and many other players don’t effectively compete – is an important role for these companies and their products. I wonder if stepping into the content management space is a good move – will it not distract them from the focus of building and refining excellent information discovery capabilities?
Content management with other platforms
Autonomy is not the first of the leaders to make this kind of move. When Microsoft bought Fast last year, they seemed to turn from their recent declaration of Autonomy being the ideal search tool for SharePoint to this unspoken statement that it wasn’t necessarily the best tool, and maybe the best tool would be one all of their own. Inquira, a leader in knowledge management, wins many of their bids because they offer the complete knowledge management platform which includes content management for a knowledge base. Will the other enterprise search companies go the same way? Endeca is already offering API’s that enable page layouts, business tools for content selection, and so on – though to me these information driven tools are a much better fit with their product offering than content management would be – but it’s not a large step for them to acquire a tool to enable content management also.
Content management must include better search
Many existing content systems (like SharePoint, and indeed Interwoven’s platform) claim to come with some level of search – and it is very poor. The biggest problem I’ve seen with content, document or knowledge management platform launches at any large organization is almost always that the people deploying such an initiative naively assume that the search that comes with the platform will work well enough. What ends up happening, time and again, is that the content system becomes a dumping ground of information where even the contributors of a document or piece of content cannot find it again. This is often true of even intranet web sites that are setup through content systems like these.
I’ve said before, most people could locate a video on YouTube that they saw a few months ago, far quicker than an employee of a typical corporation can find a document they read last week. The main reason is that content systems only work when there’s tools to get the information out as easily and conveniently as it is to get the information in. This means that you need tools to find it (more than keyword search – contextual search), to navigate it (summarization and guided navigation) and to share it effectively with other users (tagging, shared bookmarking, etc.). These tools have generally only been supplied or powered by the enterprise search companies to date.
After the launch of the content platform, most enterprises realise that these tools need to be more than just an afterthought, but this real understanding and acceptance takes time to reach and this expense often seems politically hard to justify after the expense of the content platform launch that was meant to solve the information management problem in the first place.
So while it’s good that organizations will soon be able to buy from Autonomy a product that combines quality enterprise search and content management our of the box, so to speak, I’m also worried that this will mean that applying those search tools to other content systems will be less successful, and that overall the quality of those tools will degrade.
A new kind of content tool?
Having said that, Autonomy is well positioned now to do some truly amazing things with this new combination of products, as Inquira has been doing with theirs. They can truly make content management an information management and discovery experience if they so choose. They have the option of dropping the old paradigms of content management systems that are proven not to work – like fixed taxonomies that are supposed to reflect enterprise information structures, for example. I can envisage a powerful information tool emerging from this combination; a tool where content and information is truly managed and shared; a tool which is a true extension to the knowledge workers workspace; a tool where information does not just flow in and disappear, but where knowledge discovery can truly occur. I suppose that remains to be seen.
What next? Open source?
It will be worth watching the other players like Endeca to see what their next steps might be. The CNet article I mentioned talks about a new player called Lucid Imagination (great name!) who will support and extend the Lucene / Solr open source search tools currently fostered by the Apache organization. While I’m less familiar with Solr than I’d like to be, they’ve a lot of work to do to get those tools closer to some of the capabilities offered by the likes of Autonomy and Endeca – but perhaps they’ve got the answer? Maybe the open source community will build the search and information discovery tools of the future while the enterprise leaders become distracted and fragmented in an attempt to pursue ever bigger markets. It will be interesting to watch, and find out.
What do you think? Should enterprise search companies be merging content management with their platforms? Will this distract the industry from building the tools and capabilities we need? What about open source and companies like Lucid – can they compete successfully in this space? Please let me know your thoughts, thanks!
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