Analysts getting a bad press – how can they do better?

It seems to be a bad summer for analyst companies in several sectors: here's Forrester getting a kicking from Digital Clarity Group about their Wave report on Digital Experience Delivery Platforms (my first challenge was understanding what on earth those are, but I think it's a new shiny name for web content management), Nuix Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2014 day 1 – Decisions, research and a Meetup quiz

This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading

Three reasons why your search may be prehistoric

ArnoldIT wondered today why we were bothering to announce an upgrade to the venerable dtSearch engine, when they "weren’t aware of too many people still using that software". Perhaps it's time for a quick reality check here - we regularly see clients with search engines that many would consider prehistoric still in active use. Here's some reasons why that might be so:

Is Enterprise Search dead? No, but it's changing…

I spent yesterday morning at Ovum's briefing on Enterprise Search, and they kindly invited me to sit on a discussion panel. One of the more controversial topics raised by analyst Mike Davis was 'Is Enterprise Search dead?' which provoked some lively discussion. We also heard from Tyler Tate of Twigkit on Search UX, Exalead on Search Based Applications and Continue reading

Mixed reactions as HP buys Autonomy

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

Whitepaper – Why you should be considering open source search

I've uploaded a whitepaper I wrote a short while ago : "In these rapidly changing times we don't know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it's important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data volumes that may not scale linearly. Maintaining control over the future of your search software is also key. Open source search has come of age and every modern business should be awa...Continue reading

How not to make the same mistake twice

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

Further revolutions

Back for the second day of Lucene Revolution, with some great talks on migrating to Solr from FAST ESP, the new flexible indexing features coming to Lucene 'real soon now', and finishing off with a panel discussion. I felt privileged to sit as part of this panel between Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, and Paul Doscher of Exalead - the discussion was lively and interesting (I hope!) to the audience. I'm looking forward to returning to the UK ...Continue reading