coneblog

It is time to go to the marketplace and see what is out there. To survey the marketplace, I used a range of techniques: Google searches for search vendors; Specialist IT websites (including ITToolbox) for articles and whitepapers; Marketplace analyses from firms such as Forrester and Giga; trade periodicals; and tradeshows such as AIIM. What emerged was a confusing picture.

In reviewing the firms and the literature, I tried to understand the different offerings and group the participants in some way. I probably reviewed thirty different vendors and sets of literature, and was hard-pressed to find natural groupings of vendors and offerings.

The industry analysts were not much help – they grouped vendors into categories like “incumbent, emerging, and niche”. This was helpful, but did not identify the differentiators among the offerings.

After a good bit of head-scratching, I finally worked out the following categorizations:

1) Basic Search: These are vendors who focus on search without the frills – not Enterprise, not classification and categorization, but search based primarily on word indexing. Example are Microsoft Index Server, ISYS and Google.

2) Advanced Search: These are vendors who start with basic search, then add some “special sauce”. These include vendors who offer advanced categorization, taxonomy, Data Base access, user profiling, etc. They may categorize themselves as “Enterprise”, “Mission Critical”, “Comprehensive Answer Platform”, etc. Examples include Convera and Verity.

3) Application Targeted Search: These are vendors who target their solutions at a specific application segment, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Primus is a vendor with this positioning.

4) Content Management: These are vendors who offer a search solution as part of a more comprehensive content management solution. These include Vignette and Stellent.

5) Services Vendors: These are services firms that have partnered with software solutions vendors to offer a complete, integrated solution. Vendors include Contegra, Refinery and IBM.

So, I had a basic map of the vendor landscape – which of these categories was right for us?