Archive for the ‘Market trends’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Roadmap FAST Search: for SharePoint and Internet Business

February 13 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

In view of the fact that it has been a year since Microsoft acquired FAST, there has been a lot of hush-hush about the Enterprise search roadmap. However, at the yearly FAST forward conference, Microsoft’s press release Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map reached the public.

There are no big surprises, but a lot of interesting details to come.
Briefly speaking Microsoft is focusing on two areas: search to enhance business productivity and search to earn money online.

Here at Findwise we have been working with customers integrating SharePoint and FAST ESP for some time, and ESP certainly adds a lot of value by extending SharePoint’s main strengths: content management and collaboration. Office 14, which will probably see the light early next year, will hopefully add more flexibility to their infrastructure solutions out of the box.
More information about the licensing models are yet to come and even though FAST will continue to develop ESP as a standalone (to run on both Unix and Linux), the roadmap ties existing and potential Microsoft customers closer by presenting search as an integrated part of their business productivity offering.

As for FAST Search Internet Business Microsoft’s target group are companies looking for earning money online. During FAST forward 2007 there was a lot of talk about the future search driven portals and during the 2008 event about the ability to understanding user intent.
Today online consumers have higher expectations when it comes to search and the ability to show related information (such as Amazon’s “people that bought this product also bought”..) as well as showing contextual advertising (related to search terms, geographical location etc) and recommendations will create loyal customers. FAST has quite a few customers using search for strategic online business so one should keep an eye on the release of the new beta version during 2009.

If you read Swedish, Helge Legernes, one of the founders of Findwise is giving his comment in Computer Sweden.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Autonomy extends its business model with compliance

January 28 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

On January 22:nd, Interwoven entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Autonomy, for a total transaction value of approximately $775 million.

Ever since Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST there have been quite a few discussions in blogs and forums whether any of the giants such as Oracle, IBM or even Google would make an attractive offer for Autonomy. The company has, during the last few years, always been a clear leading candidate within Enterprise Search and its range of offerings within Multimedia, Digital Asset Management and Information management solutions has made the customer base grow faster than ever.

However, the acquisition of Interwoven shows that Autonomy is serious when it comes to growing on its own premises. The product portfolio now contains a strong offering for legal and compliance and Autonomy has, once more, proven that they prefer to extend and strengthen their business model.

According to the press release the companies ‘share a vision to fundamentally change the way organizations discover, analyze and manage information’.
Beyond the buzzwords, there seems to be a clear vision and it will be interesting to see how this affects Enterprise Search in general and Autonomys future direction in particular.

Caroline Abrahamsson

A strategic approach to search

June 23 - 2008 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The other week I attended ”From business to buttons” a yearly conference about usability and ‘designing for effect’ held in Malmö. Maria from Findwise was there to talk about ‘search driven design – or why can’t or intranet be more like Google?’, while I had the privilege to walk around talking to attendees about search.
The conference gathered people from a broad range of industries such as telecom, banking, retail etc, but what struck me the most was that no matter how different their business was, their challenges when it came to Enterprise Search where like peas in a pod. The employees just want to find the information they need to do their job in an efficient way. Preferably by typing a simple keyword and get accurate results in a Google-stylish way. Many companies have made investments in Enterprise Search platforms, hoping that this will magically increase findability.

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Maria Johansson

Improving Findability – Is your content really available to users?

April 24 - 2008 | Maria Johansson

Web service award recently issued a press release stating that the web is being flooded in 2008. This flood of information is caused by the demands for availability as well as the users’ demands for finding all information possibly needed, online. So Swedish websites are being flooded with information and navigation and structure aren’t coping with the problem. And so the users can’t find the information…

I believe something has been missed here. There is a big difference between just publishing your content online to make it available to users and making it findable. Could you really say your content is available when it’s not findable? When talking about search, I always like to use the quote: “If the user can’t find the information, it’s not there.” You don’t make the information available to users just by publishing it; you also have to make the information findable.

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Microsoft is opening its wallet for search

February 3 - 2008 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Three weeks after making a $1.2 billion bid for FAST search & Transfer Microsoft announces that they make a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. So far it‘s only an offer which Yahoo’s board and stockholders are considering but, to conclude, Microsoft is serious about going into strategic search markets.

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Mattias Brunnert

Microsoft bids for Fast

January 8 - 2008 | Mattias Brunnert

In a recent press release Microsoft has announced an offer to acquire Fast Search and Transfer.
At Findwise we are of course excited about this, as it clearly shows how the world’s leading software vendor has understood the importance of search to the modern enterprise. We are also convinced that the result will be an excellent merger between technical as well as market knowledge of both parties. Since Findwise has a close partnership with Fast and Microsoft you can be sure that we will continue to deliver cutting edge solutions in the future.

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Trends for 2008

December 31 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008?
Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.

As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors. (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Conclusions of trends 2007

December 31 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Looking back at the search trends that were predicted for 2007 one can conclude that many of the larger research institutes, such as Forrester and Gartner, made a great forecast.

2007 was supposed to raise the question of 2.0 for search technology within the companies (and it seems like wikis, blogs and collaborative tools was all that we heard about for some months). Further on, there was a discussion of integration with business tools, such as BI and search, to create more powerful ways to extract critical data from several sources. The fact that IBM bought Cognos and FAST Radar says something about what we can expect in the future.

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Helge Legernes

Evolution of enterprise search

October 24 - 2007 | Helge Legernes

Yesterday I have had an exciting and challenging day. Caroline and I visited a new customer, a large global Swedish industrial enterprise, for whom Findwise is doing a prestudy of the customer’s search requirements. The guy, whom we met was very alert and challenged us in the evolution of enterprise search and if the technology is mature enough for “safe” project deployments. I have managed search projects throughout Europe since 2002 and today it became clear to me how the projects and hence the search technology has changed.

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Maria Johansson

Internet life in the future

October 1 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Västra Götalands Regionen). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

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