Category Archives: Business

New Year predictions: further search storms ahead!

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2012 has been a fascinating and stormy year for those of us in the search business. We've seen a raft of further acquisitions of commercial closed source search companies by bigger players, some convinced that what used to be called Enterprise Search is now a solution to Big Data (like Stephen Arnold we wonder what will succeed Big Data as the next marketing term - I love his phrase "In a quest for revenue, the vendo...Continue reading

Autonomy & HP – a technology viewpoint

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I'm not going to comment on the various financial aspects of the recent news about HP's write-down of the value of its Autonomy acquisition - others are able to do this far better than me - but I would urge anyone interested to re-read the documents Oracle released earlier this year. However, I am going to write about the IDOL technology itself (I'd ...Continue reading

Following the money….all the way to open source search.

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There's an old saying that to find out what's really going on, you have to "follow the money". In the search industry two recent events have pointed the way: firstly, Attivio raised $34 million in new funding. Attivio produce a solution based on their own Active Intelligence Engine (yes, it's still just a search e...Continue reading

Flax partners with open source support specialists Sirius Corporation

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We're very happy to announce we've partnered with Sirius Corporation. Sirius are the leading U.K. provider of managed services, support and training for open source software with an impressive and growing list of clients including Canonical, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Met Office. We've recently carried out a major project for which Sir...Continue reading

Big Data – It's not always big and it's not always clever

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There's been a recent flurry of activity from search vendors (and those larger companies that have been buying them) around the theme of Big Data, which has become the fashionable marketing term for a sheaf of technologies including search, machine learning, Map Reduce and for scalability in general. If anyone impertinently asks why co...Continue reading

Mixed reactions as HP buys Autonomy

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The blogotweetosphere has been positively buzzing since last night's announcement that Hewlett Packard will be buying Autonomy for £7.1bn, while divesting itself of its PC business. Many commentators have put a positive spin on this, pointing to Autonomy's meteoric rise from a small office in Cambridge to the behemoth it is today....Continue reading

Economic Trends in Enterprise Search Solutions – unsustainable pricing in a changing market?

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This week I was passed a link to a European Commission report on the Enterprise Search market, which I've just finished ploughing through (it's 123 pages and not exactly light reading). It provides an overview of the history of the market and some current trends, but sadly misses out almost completely the rapidly growing open source sector. The authors say "...open source solutions have been disregarded because they do n...Continue reading

Chalk and cheese – the difficulty of analysing open source options

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David Fishman of Lucid Imagination has blogged on how open source search is treated by the analyst community (you can even use his links to get hold of some of the reports mentioned for the usual price of your contact details). We can add to his list a report from the Real Story Group<...Continue reading

How not to make the same mistake twice

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We've been aware that some FAST customers will be considering migration for a while now - but Autonomy have finally caught up. However, if you migrate from one closed source solution to another, how can you guarantee that the same sort of events that have led to the current situation won't happen again? With open source, there's no vendor lock-in, a wide choice of companies to assist you with develo...Continue reading