The Purpose-Driven Search Life

Coming from a guy from HP Autonomy, the next part of our conversation was rather revealing. I asked Jerome whether it was ironic that Autonomy, that once wanted to be the omnipotent search engine for the masses, was now somewhat softer about that, and was willing to admit that "enterprise search" was kind of a non sequitur... that in fact, enterprise search was more of a strategy than a product, and the key to success was to develop a plan that made it all work together.

"Yes, there are specialized search engines for specialized search problems," he admitted readily. "For example, we are developing specialized analytics tools for processing unstructured data for healthcare applications. There will be such specialized tools for certain markets. But at the end of the day, for personal productivity, people are still looking for a single way to navigate and access all their data. They don't have that today. There's an opportunity there."

Isn't this problem being addressed by SharePoint, I wondered, where the solution solves 80% of the problem, and that's good enough for most people?

"That's what the IT people are always hoping for... a neat solution where the user can put everything into a nice little send box and control what he's doing. But that world is no more. I use DropBox and SendIt and SharePoint, too... IT would like me to use only one solution, but that just isn't the way it is anymore. SharePoint is only one of the many things I use."

The same goes for search in SharePoint. "Microsoft has bundled FAST Search into SharePoint, but that's all you can search... SharePoint! That's ignoring the fundamental problem. Information is very distributed," he exclaimed.

"The way we look at it is this: We want to connect people with their networks of people, associates and repositories, regardless of who they are and what tool they're using. That was the origin of enterprise search, but it will soon look very different than the original enterprise search because it's consumed in such a very different way. It has to address information that really didn't exist 10 years ago, such as mobile and social. Every vendor of content management repositories, whether it's Microsoft or Google or whomever, all assume that every user is going to put all their information in those repositories. That's just not gonna happen."

The Road Ahead

He couldn't resist putting his marketing hat on for a minute: "We currently have many customers who combine tools for collaboration and information management, and use Autonomy to search across those. We are still developing other connectors. But we are now able to look for data across many different silos, on-premises as well as in the cloud.

"We have customers who have us host their search for cloud-based repositories. But the reality is that most organizations have some information they prefer to keep on premises, behind a firewall, and some they have in the cloud. That hybrid approach covers about everyone. Except for some new start-ups maybe, I know of no company that is willing to put everything in the cloud. So we have to provide a means to search both on-premise information as well as ‘outside' information. We also maintain the search engines on behalf of many companies. We will soon have a version of IDOL that will run in the cloud-only, and we expect that will be the trend that most organizations will follow."

The next challenge, insists Jerome, will be how companies deal with unstructured data. Companies have a lot of it, but haven't spent much time thinking about how to use it. How can we extract value from it? How can we add this data to improve a business process?

"As a best practice, you first have to have a strategy," he said. "Instead of indexing every single piece of data and hoping it might be useful someday, you first have to think about: ‘What kind of data do I have? What can be the value of this? What can I get rid of?' There's not a universal solution. It depends on what kinds of business the companies are in... what kind of vertical market do they service... what kinds of problems are they trying to solve...?"

Jerome talks about a really brave new world. So do the other writers in this White Paper. Please read on and join in.