NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Gold Rush: Heady Days for Enterprise Search as Institutional and External Content Merge
			John Blossom
			23 May 2005
SUMMARY:			This year's Enterprise Search Summit was a well-attended and robust expression of just how vital and important search functions have become for enterprises of every scale. Maturing enterprise search solutions included offerings from Google that are putting pressure on many other search engine providers to provide more internal and external content sources in a simple package with more features that make answers easier to find. Any way you measure it enterprise search has reached a new level of maturity that places far more emphasis on performance and results than experimentation and partial solutions. Users are coming out winners in this gold rush, but a broader array of sophisticated content sources and content organization tools will keep those users clamoring for more precious gold than ever before.

The Enterprise Search Summit at New York City's Hilton Hotel was a remarkable success by most measures. The crowd was easily larger than last year's convocation, the vendor exhibits crowded and upbeat and the speakers singing tales of significant progress in deploying not just basic search solutions but integrated knowledge management solutions with search as a centerpiece. While the degree to which enterprise search functions have been integrated into intranet portals still varies greatly in different institutions and sectors, increasingly affordable enterprise search technologies now allow enterprises to combine the best of institutional and external content and expertise into a much more cohesive fabric of information that responds to users' desires for quick answers to key knowledge needs. Best of all from a vendor's perspective there's lots of money being spent on search integration this year. It is a veritable gold rush as enterprises move beyond limited first- and second- generation search solutions honed on general Web content to deploying sophisticated search solutions that bring all enterprise assets together.

So there were a lot of smiling vendors at the conference and many fine tales of success, but also signs that the gold rush days will not be lasting much longer for many search engine providers. Consolidation continues amongst the vendors of search engines and related content technologies as clients demand a broader array of features and higher levels of search performance to satisfy users trained by open Web search engines to get satisfactory answers to questions in an instant. These high standards are accentuated by content integration needs in enterprise applications such as portals and workflow solutions that require a higher level of precision in locating those answers than ever before. The good news is that enterprise search engines have become indispensable for may institutions: the bad news for some will be that second best will no longer do.

As the gold rush to make the most of enterprise search reaches a peak, what should we watch for as things settle out? Here are a few hints as to what to expect in the months ahead:

• "Search in a box" may liberate enterprises to focus on more content value. While this was hardly the first enterprise search conference where Google has made its presence felt, it's the first one in my recollection where you could begin to see their definite impact on the enterprise search marketplace. Their "black box" Google Search Appliance still plays at the fringes of most major organizations' search operations but new versions of GSA promise far more sophisticated management of a wide variety of content sources at competitive prices. While the enterprise search gold rush is keeping numerous mediocre search engines alive, it's becoming clear that Google is about to squeeze out many search solutions that cannot compete with their unique combination of easy deployment and increasingly high-quality enterprise search results combined with desktop and Web search results. If a GSA or another well-packaged "all in one" solution can integrate easily enough with an enterprise's infrastructure and it keeps users happy and productive, why spend any more time on search? This will begin to accelerate enterprises' ability to concentrate on other advanced aspects of organizing, managing and using content that will yield more value for both users and the bottom line.
• KM tools are becoming features of broader solutions. As search engines have started to lose their mystique many search engine vendors are trying to find new ways to put some "sizzle" back in their product pitches with extensions beyond search that play the value add game for enterprises trying to satisfy ever-lengthening checklists for their content organization needs. Federated search across internal and external sources, advanced taxonomy management, locating domain expertise and content visualization tools were but a few of the knowledge management features on display in vendor booths and in key presentations. Some of the larger search engine providers are trying to use KM tools to reshape themselves as more multipurpose portal solutions, integrating advanced KM solutions into their offerings. But the rapid evolution of "portlet" standards and layers of XML content normalization from companies such as Mark Logic will accelerate the migration of KM features away from specific search engine vendors and towards an environment where they will be monetized more like content services than software solutions in a variety of portal environments.
• Enterprise multimedia is about to have a big impact on enterprise search. While the bulk of attention at Enterprise Search Summit was on text content, across the hall at the Streaming Media conference many vendors were concentrating on video content as a key component of the enterprise content environment.  Offerings from companies such as Media Publisher Inc. (MPI) publishing tools are oriented towards major corporations who have been knee-deep in enterprise video for years and trying to get individuals in their organizations to be more effective desktop producers of enterprise video. A the same time indexing of video on the open Web by Google and Yahoo! and distributors of enterprise video content such as TheNewsMarket.com are broadening the array of video resources that can play into enterprise multimedia search needs. This richer variety of content sources and more sophisticated presentation needs will further challenge search providers to incorporate a complete set of knowledge assets in their frameworks effectively. It's mostly for the larger corporations to fret about this year, but expect multimedia search to be a hot button by this time next year for many more institutions and vendors.

The good news in all of this is that enterprises are becoming far more sophisticated publishers in their own right thanks to the quality of search tools being made available today. Competing with the ease of open Web solutions and the traditional convenience of subscription content solutions providers challenges enterprises to think broadly and deeply about how they can make their own assets valuable publishing resources in their own right. The old saying is that the only people who get rich from gold rushes are the ones who sell the shovels to the miners, but in this gold rush there are a lot of enterprises walking away with far more a-glittering than when they started.

- John Blossom

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