Presentation given at a Sirius/Flax event in July 2012

1. responsive, credible, flexible
Is enterprise search dead?
No! – And why open source should
be the organisation's first choice
Mike Davis
Principal Analyst
© All images acknowledged 1
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2. Running order
● The role and scope of enterprise search,
and why organisations need to use enterprise search to
save/make money and/or provide better service
● How the enterprise search market has changed in the last
year
● Why open source should be the first choice for enterprise
search tools
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3. Information management is about
USING information
– to make a decision
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4. Decision making requires effective
information
That’s delivered:
●
At the right place
– and in context
●
At the right time
– and complete / credible / trusted
●
To the right person(s)
– who have authority to make decisions
●
And it could be anywhere across the
organisation's systems, or
out in the cloud
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5. And that requires enterprise search
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6. Key enterprise search vendors late 2011
Source and © : Ovum 2011
Analyst comparisons, like this undertaken by Ovum, have a problem with including
OSS solutions, because there are no licence revenues (market impact). So Ovum
stripped the licence estimates out (with the likes of IBM and Oracle 'bundling' the
technology for free they were pretty meaningless anyway
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7. Key enterprise search vendors late 2011 – incl.
OSS
Source and © : Ovum 2011
Four vendors have since been acquired by software behemoths: Autonomy/HP,
Endeca/Oracle, Exalead/3DS, Vivisimo/IBM. Looking at the Microsoft/FAST
experience, this does not bode well for innovation, choice, or future support. 7
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8. There is also something telling in this chart
Source and © : Ovum 2011
Even if we accept that all the functionality the respective vendors claimed was
available in their products, the difference between the stated technical capabilities
is very small, and the 80:20 rule applies in software usage.
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9. Why open source should be the first
choice
Open source software is by design of a higher quality than
propriety:
● It is tighter - because it has often been written from scratch,
it doesn't the 'bloatware' of historic code contained within it
● It is transparent - both the code itself and the programmer is
named. The latter approach was adopted by Microsoft as its
programming model after a series of software failures, and
also explains why the code is tighter.
● It gets fixed faster – Butler Group/Ovum research in 2004
identified that OSS bugs would be rectified up to ten times
faster than propriety because the community is a 24x7
support operation (backed by the likes of IBM), and there is a
lot of kudos in being the first to come up with a fix (as
opposed to the person who wrote the 'bug')
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10. Why open source should be the first
choice
● The OSS market is already stable, and maturing fast, with the
likes of FLAX, Sirius, Lucid, HP, IBM, Oracle and even
Microsoft offering support for enterprise customers, not out of
largesse, but for commercial motives.
● IBM, for example, gave significant support to SUSE and its
distribution of Linux when Red Hat appeared to be heading for
oligopoly status – Why? Because both IBM Software Group
and IBM Global Services did not want to be dependent on a
single global distro - whilst IBM did not want to be a distro in
its own right.
● This also explains why IBM 'employs' many staff to work full
time on OSS and 'community' projects. Detailed figures are not
available, but a common estimate is that IBM has invested over
$1billion in OSS – and of course its own OmniFind enterprise
search tool is based on OSS Lucene.
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11. Summary
● With the requirement to make faster and better
decisions on increasingly large and disparate
information sources, the need for enterprise search tools
that will need to 'outlive' the repositories and systems they
crawl has never been higher.
● Some propriety products 'may' be marginally technically
better than OSS, but they come with a risk of support being
lost through the continued consolidation of the vendor base.
● Enterprise search is one of the most mature pieces of OSS,
in particular Lucene and its enterprise cousin Solr are now
proven in the largest of deployments, and OSS has an
experienced and growing support infrastructure.
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12. responsive, credible, flexible
Thank you
miked@msmd-advisors.com
www.msmd-advisors.com
@mikemasseydavis
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