Search and Content Management Predictions

I hope you all had a great Memorial Day holiday weekend. It was one of the better ones, weather-wise at least, in the NY area in a few years.

In this blog, I’d like to explore a few thoughts on internet search, enterprise search and content management, since last week I attended, for the second time, the Enterprise Search Summit conference in New York City.

Since I also attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in March, it’s difficult not comparing the two conferences. The attendance and sheer size of SES is an order of magnitude greater than the Enterprise Search conference (2000 attendees vs. 200) and the mega-companies such as Google and Microsoft have a much larger showing at the SES conference.

It is commonly presumed that enterprise search is meant to manage the search for content inside the business firewall, while internet and web search is geared to find content for the general public. In general that is true, although companies such as Microsoft and their FAST and Sharepoint offerings as well as Google and their business search division have blurred some of these distinctions. Since I don’t want to spend an entire blog on differentiating how enterprise search differs from internet search, a decent summary of some of the distinctions can be found from New Idea Engineering (an enterprise search company).

Since I’ve spent time in all 3 areas, in some of my ensuing blogs I will attempt to look more closely at each area separately. But to begin with, and without trying to sound like a Gartner or Forrester analyst, I’d like to offer my 10 predictions and observations:

·  Google and Microsoft will largely control search both from an internet search, as well as to a large degree enterprise search as well.

·  Google will have to purchase or invest in a larger business-side search organization to further penetrate the enterprise area. Its skills, as evident from the Enterprise Search Conference, are clearly quite thin on the business end.

·  Google and Microsoft will buy, invest in or invest organically in more social networking companies and capabilities (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to broaden their offerings and public reach.

·  Microsoft, to maintain a player status, will buy Yahoo to replace MSN and its Live Search search engine which have too little market share. Google still commands 65% +/- marketshare. Microsoft will then have to determine whether they can embed some of the capabilities of FAST into Yahoo.

·  Enterprise search and content management will be constructed on a Microsoft model including Sharepoint and FAST, further marginalizing companies such as IBM, EMC and Open Text

·  Microsoft, through its Sharepoint offering, may eventually own the entire new content management space. Google Apps potentially have a play in this space, but for the present at least is not ready for enterprise prime time at a major corporate level quite yet. I don’t see anything dramatically new from EMC or IBM and I hope Open Text can keep pace to keep everyone honest so to speak. But today’s software industry is based on revenue and market share, and this industry is moving so quickly, only those with the deepest resolve and pockets can keep with it.

·  Business intelligence and analytical ability will become further embedded in the internet search engines (not just enterprise search). As evidence, FAST, originally a focused internet search engine that morphed into an enterprise search platform, has some significant capabilities in the business analytics area (guided navigation for example).

·  Companies such as SAP and SAS who are attempting to move into the search side with their analytical engine will have to form alliances, build API’s or license their technologies via an OEM agreement, or they will be wasting their time.

·  Other enterprise search vendors such as Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo and Exalead may to have to focus on certain vertical industries to be a viable play (eDiscovery is an example), or be bought.

·  Finally, search (internet and enterprise) and content management will further converge technologies and provide capabilities to the end user that can locate content – whether structured or unstructured – either in a dimensional way (folders and files) or in a more search friendly way.

In the blogs coming up, I plan on discussing more on these relevant topics as well as share some related work I’m doing in the healthcare and medical area around search, marketing and social networking.