Enterprise search wars

IBM has sought to cement its position as a leader in the enterprise search space with a new version of its flagship OmniFind product launched last week. Features in there which might appeal to large organisations include the ability to crawl Lotus’ new social networking and collaboration tools which were launched at the last Lotusphere event. Analysts rightly believe that Lotus Quickr, Connections, and other similar applications will increasingly be the places where vitally important information resides in the organisation, so it’s a positive that Big Blue has acknowledged this.

There’s also stuff in there for multi-language support and a new Top Results Analysis feature which promises to display results graphically, so that users can drill down into particular areas as they see fit. This kind of thing isn’t new of course, but seems to be getting increasingly popular for discovery, rather than search, activities. The only barrier to this kind of technology could be that many users still can’t unlock a lot of value from it. More training please.

But then, what you believe is really important in enterprise search always depends on which search vendors you talk to. Speak to Google, Sinequa, Exalead and the other (relatively) young pups on the enterprise search trail and they’ll say the days of complex, costly, unwieldy search implementations is over. They’ll say that the whole consumerisation of IT trend is nowhere more obvious than in search, with worker bees and more importantly chief execs now so familiar with web search that they want the same easy-to-use functionality brought to bear on corporate data.

And then you go to IBM, whose programme director for search and content discovery, Aaron Brown, told me that actually customers don’t want this, they want to drive better use of information, and this goes so much deeper than search. And then you go to Fast, whose chief executive John Lervik once told me that firms could eventually have dedicated chief search officers to help manage the complexity of their environments. Mention this vision to a Google and you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of “you won’t need a chief search officer with our technology”. Which is true, but then again there isn’t such a thing as a typical organisation.