The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.

Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.

All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.

Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.

We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.

Labels: access solutions, enterprise, federated content, federated search, Google, museglobal, search

The rumbles of Hoover's initiative with enterprise social networking tools provider Visible Path began more than a year ago, but the partnership did not roll out its final production version of Hoover's Connect that uses Visible Path technology until last week - an announcement that also included the news that Hoover's was acquiring Visible Path. The reaction to this deal and product rollout has been somewhat mixed from content industry professionals, some clucking about customers wanting more security built into the product that resulted in slow testing and others doubting that enterprises will adopt an enterprise-based tool for navigating relationship networks that relies on email as its primary content source.

While there may be more than a grain of truth in these criticisms, it appears that Hoover's has taken an important step towards shifting its position with major enterprises from one of a supplier of a business information database aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses to one which offers a "hook" into enterprise operations that can help organizations to use Hoover's to leverage their own business information more effectively. Hoover's Connect enables individuals or enterprises to link to contacts identified in Hoover's content to contacts found in personal and enterprise content sources such as email and calendaring services that may lead to a stronger relationship with sales and business development prospects. Controls in Hoover's Connect enable individuals to control just how much information about their trusted business contacts that they share with colleagues, which may limit the quality of information available to them. But this flexibility enables people to give to the system as much as they feel comfortable doing - and to realize over time that in a give-to-get exchange of information with colleagues sometimes giving is a needed behavior.

All well and good, but will Visible Path help the perceived value of core Hoover's content? Inevitably the answer has to be yes, but with some important caveats. Visible Path tools in Hoovers Connect enable people to move quickly from business profile information in Hoover's content to navigating their personal and enterprise relationship "degrees of separation." This enhances the core value of using Hoover's content as a point from which to initiate the researching of potential business contacts through trustworthy information. You can also connect your own networks of contacts to other networks on an opt-in basis, enabling you to collaborate on specific business opportunities with other organizations or individuals in an environment that enables you to expose just the right amount of contact information to partners. That's a smart way to manage this content that parallels how people expose business contact information in the real world.

But as much as this is useful in and of itself, it would be more useful if the Hoover's content could be integrated into enterprise applications more effectively via Visible Path capabilities. As it is, the corporate profiles found in Hoover's database service seem to benefit only indirectly from this integration, and vice versa: there's not a sense that either desperately needs the other to be complete. One would hope that metadata from both services would benefit each other more directly, for example. But this may change over time as the capabilities of Hoovers connect open up more integration opportunities for Hoover's in larger institutions. For smaller businesses and organizations this "good enough" integration of business information with networked contacts may be sufficient for many to continue to leverage Hoover's core databases while enhancing the usefulness of their internal business contacts data.

Hoover's is moving to rebuild momentum as both an enterprise-oriented brand and an online brand that can both fend off newer competition for the attention of business audiences and to take on some of the more established brands in larger enterprises. This is no small feat to pull off, given the rapid rise of services like Generate, Zoominfo and other services that mine Web content and other sources to provide services that can pick away at Hoover's market share even as they try to pick away at Factiva, OneSource and other larger business information brands.
Sometimes being the middle brand in a rapidly changing market is not much fun.

With its Visible Path acquisition Hoover's may be signaling a period in which they choose to add muscle to their capabilities that can push out into areas behind the corporate firewalls where other business information providers have feared to tread heavily thus far. It may take several more go-arounds of content development and major enterprise adoption for this move to pay off fully, but for now it's a very positive step for Hoover's to take towards being a trustworthy business information brand in an era in which individuals and institutions are calling the shots on what really constitutes quality content.

Labels: Business Information, enterprise, Hoover's, social networking, visible path

Sometimes two distressful situations can combine to create relief, rare though that might be. Such seems to be the lucky break that both Microsoft and FAST Search and Transfer caught in the recent acquisition of FAST by Microsoft. FAST needed fast relief from crippling cash flow problems generated in part from a sales strategy that reached beyond their ability to deliver on ambitious promises. Microsoft on the other hand had failed to create any significant sales momentum behind its own enterprise search efforts, with players such as Google beginning to breathe down their necks more warmly with each passing day. So a mere USD 1.2 billion in cash works quite nicely to bring together two impressive partners that promise to dominate enterprise platforms for some time to come.

FAST's rapid growth over the past few years into an increasingly dominant position in enterprise search markets is just the ticket that Microsoft needs to position itself in increasingly competitive enterprise platform markets. With ever more content being consumed in enterprises via non-Microsoft platforms, domination requires a more agnostic approach to assembling on-demand content than Microsoft has been able to manage recently. FAST offers both solid enterprise search technology and an installed base of global corporate clients that Microsoft can leverage very effectively with the combination of FAST search capabilities to gather content and Microsoft's Sharepoint servers to store and aggregate content.

This last point is especially important for Microsoft's future revenues. With its Vista operating system rendered a ho-hum at best by most enterprise users and panned widely in consumer markets Microsoft needs to shift the center of its profits to platforms sy uch as search engines that are more central to what drives internal publishing in today's enterprises. Each page of search results can become in effect a purpose-built portal: in effect, the database is now, the content that's required to solve immediate business problems. Search technology such as that offered by FAST holds out the promise of search engines becoming the focal point for Microsoft's enterprise publishing strategy, offering Microsoft more opportunity to have offerings that scale effectively to both global and mid-sized corporations. That $1.2 billlion make look like relative pocket change today, but in terms of the market share secured and the future market positioning that will be required to counter slowing sales on its aging operating systems it's a major investment in securing Microsoft's future cash flow.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, enterprise, FAST Search and Transfer, Microsoft, search

The annual KM World & Intranets 2007 Conference / Expo in San Jose keeps growing, adding a West Coast version of the successful Enterprise Search Summit (ESS) held in May in New York. The co-location of Taxonomy Bootcamp and Streaming Media West creates a dynamic interplay between different aspects of the information business, from technology to enterprise content.

Attendees voiced the value of the range of tracks from strategic management of knowledge to the practical aspects of selecting and living with search software and applications, down to the nitty-gritty of taxonomy implementations. Traffic was good in the vendor booths of the Expo area, as technologists and content managers mingled over receptions, meals and seminars.

The opening keynoter for ESS was Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies, IDC. describing a market in flux with many competing technologies. Search is the missing piece for enterprise software, and large software vendors are entering the market. SaaS options are good solutions due to the complexity of search technology, and need to have the latest version.

The keynote was a nice lead into the session that I chaired on "Solving the Multiple Search Engine Problem" addressing approaches to the proliferation of departmental search vendors within organizations. Rennie Walker, Wells Fargo, described "waking up one morning with the multi-search engine blues", resulting in creating a Search Center of Excellence (COE). Swetswise uses a federating search software, Museglobal, to deliver a subscription delivery product incorporating multiple search indexes. Miles Kehoe, New Idea Engineering, identified the challenges of maintaining distributed search engine indexes--a practicality not addressed by vendors.

Security, ediscovery and regulatory compliance were themes in other presentations. Search across multiple repositories brings the thorny problems of access control to the underlying content. Depending on the application, different levels of security may be necessary, down to the sub-document level. Choices include "early binding" vs. "late binding" options for access. Additional challenges include the changes in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure of 12/1/2006, making risk management of the enterprise search environment more critical.

Steve Arnold, highly regarded industry expert on search engines chaired a keynote panel originally entitled "Giants Do Stumble: Are Google and Microsoft in Decline?" modified in the final program to "What's Next for the Search Engine Giants", questioning product managers from Google and Microsoft, who provided little new insight. Both companies are relative newcomers to the enterprise search space, and had vendor booths in the expo, joining traditional vendors. Arnold, in a later session, honed in on Google and his analysis of their patents to predict new directions.

Findability is more than keyword search in full text documents, a message which came through in both the sessions and vendor presentations. Sessions on semantic search indicate progress in actual implementation, which is closely tied to classification and taxonomy systems. Improved navigation, particularly faceted search, are another approach to improve the user experience, and improve findability.

Niche software vendors on the exhibit floor, demonstrated other approaches to improving findability. Siderean uses a relationship approach which intuitively fits research and discovery processes, to improve findability. Cognition was demonstrating their linguistic search software with great promise for in depth research, particularly in scientific and technical literature, with a plethora of potential search terms. Deep Web Technologies showed the power of federating search software, as implemented at science.gov and scitopia.org.

Enterprise search and management of organizational intellectual capital have become mission-critical. The challenge is finding the right approaches for the organization, then the technical tools for implementation. Increasingly, behavioral and linguistic aspects are being recognized as essential factors in the process of adding value to the organization. Search is not easy, and delivering answers to people is not straightforward. It's finding the right combination of solutions that challenges the attendees at these conferences..there is no one-size-fits-all!

Labels: enterprise, ITI, Jean Bedord, search, Semantic Web

With much ballyhoo Microsoft unveiled its new HealthVault beta portal recently, a big push by the Microsoft to get a leg up on Google's position as a source for health information. The HealthVault portal itself could hardly be called a portal: it's a landing page that invites you to use a special version of Microsoft's Live Search, set up a portfolio of private health information that can be shared with trusted sources and a link to software that can enable one to download information from health monitoring devices into your HealthVault data. Once you've selected any of these options there's no navigating back to the main portal page. So what you get right now is more of a showcase for potential partners than an online presence that's going to attract an audience.

The Live Search tuned up for HealthVault has a number of useful features, many of which have been used for a long time already in Google's health-oriented searches and in Amazon's A9 search portal. The latter similarities are no coincidence, given Amazon's decision a while back to dump Google as a search partner in favor of Microsoft and the highlighting of Amazon's content in the HealthVault portal. Search results are pretty good in HealthVault, with some being downright rich in content and others being merely comparable to Google search results. Put in a broad terms such as "Autism" and HealthVault Live Search returns a column labeled "Articles" with Wikipedia content - kind of a mini-Answers.com - a column of Web search results and a column of sponsored content from Amazon with contextual ads beneath it. Atop this is a category-based navigation similar to Google's Co-Op feature.

Something a bit more off the beaten track like "pancreatic cancer ductal tumors"
ditches the Wikipedia articles and draws in more scholarly content in search results than one would find in Google, which tends to segregate scholarly resources off in its Google Scholar search. That may or may not be a good thing depending on who is using this feature, but if you're trying to dig deeper into a health issue you definitely have some contrasts between Google and Microsoft to consider. There are also some interesting differences when you try a term that may not be thought of immediately as a health resource, such as "cinnamon," which is now being used as a resource for blood sugar and cholesterol management. In Google there is no health-oriented Co-Op category information available for this search whereas HealthVault provides a very useful taxonomy. However, again HealthVault comes out a little heavy on the hardcore health information and a little light on more consumer-accessible informaiton.

If you see an article that interests you in search results you can bookmark it into your HealthVault secure account information via the "Add to Scrapbook" feature, but in doing so you'll have to pass through a login screen and some other screens that were just plain frightening - I had no idea what would happen if I said "yes" to the questions asked, but went along anyway - just to get a bookmark into my HealthVault account. I'll allow that this is a Beta product and that such oddities are likely to be worked out in time, but it's one of those typical instances of Microsoft features that sound great on paper and wind up never working the way that you hoped that they would.

The HealthVault Account feature allows a member to use their HealthVault information in association with a number of health screening services and online medical records services, presumably to make it easier for people to give you proper medical care and advice. This is obviously the big corporate hook for HealthVault, with doubtless the hope that major HealthCare providers would default to HealthVault as a common provider of this type of service and enable them in time to deliver streamlined services and benefits based on HealthVault as a common interface. That may very well be, but right out of the box don't expect too many consumers to be jumping head over heels for this service. The non-friendly home page for HealthVault says in essence to the consumer "Hi, we're Microsoft, give us all of your health history details and we'll make it easy for corporations to look at them." Thanks, but I think that we've been there already with Microsoft Wallet, an earlier stab by Microsoft to become the universal online payment service for ecommerce. You'd think that they'd learn from that experience that it helps to look at things from the consumer's perspective first.

One of the more promising features of the beta HealthVault is the HealthVault Connection Center, which highlights software that makes it easy for people using health monitoring equipment to collect data from these devices in HealthVault and to make it available to physicians who can scan that information as needed. This plays into Microsoft's strengths as a provider of gizmo interfaces and offers some potential long-term benefits for wellness monitoring services. But even here it's early days for the beta product: the HealthVault Connection Center at this point is just a set of links to Microsoft's device driver and software download pages on the main Microsoft Site. There's no integration to speak of.

Microsoft has carved out an ambitious vision for HealthVault, tying in personal, Web and device-driven content into a framework that may make it easier for health care professionals to provide services to patients and wellness enthusiasts. In the still-sketchy outlines of this product you can see how Microsoft sees a huge opportunity to become a master repository for health information that could make it a power player in the health care industry as a result. With the far more competitive and commoditized media marketplace looking less and less like a winner for Microsoft this leveraging of its strengths in both the consumer marketplace and the corporate marketplace may be a great way for Microsoft to firm up its established but threatened footholds in both markets.

But clearly this ambitious vision has a long way to go. The Live Seach results are very well designed and promising, but they are not so clearly superior to Google's existing health care offerings that it is likely to create an immediate stampede to Live's view of health information. The corporate feel of the site and the utter lack of deftness in making people feel that there's something in it for them to provide highly sensitive personal information puts a damper on the potentially strong value-add features that could be built off of it. The device integration is a nice concept, but there's a long way to go before we see dashboards built off of this information that will be useful to both consumers and health professionals. There was enough goodness in all of this to get at least one news cycle of positive spin, but there's a long road ahead to make this a viable hit for Microsoft.

Still, it's more than its major competitors have done lately to offer a vision of how personal, Web, scholarly and device-driven medical content can come together to improve health care for both consumers and professionals. Microsoft would claim that the've stolen the march from Google with this initiative, and from a vision standpoint they may have a reason to crow a bit. But from an execution standpoint it's a clumsy enough start with typical Microsoft over-hyping of fairly modest features and partner relationships that potential heavyweight content partners are not going to get bowled over immediately as they have been in days past. This may buy Google and others time to come up with their own approaches that may have a more consumer-friendly appeal that will be essential for the long-term success of any such initiative. In the meantime HealthVault's visionary offering gives both content producers and medical professionals a lot to think about in how they plan to make better use of the Web to improve their services to consumers.

Labels: collaboration, consumers, enterprise, HealthVault, Microsoft, STM

Google has been pushing its search appliances, email and online application services to enterprises for quite some time, but it's inability to speak the same language as I.T. managers on issues such as security has slowed their progress significantly. Consider their recent acquisition of Postini a major investment in overcoming their I.T. gap and providing new inroads for Google's ASP-oriented content and office automation services. Postini specializes in managing security for external communications such as email, messaging and Web site access with services that are compliance officer-friendly and that are totally outsourced.

Investors Business Daily notes that this places Google in competition with other security services providers such as McAfee and Symantec, but it's really a strong swipe at both Microsoft and as well at Software-as-a-Service providers such as Salesforce.com who are making quick inroads with ASP-based content and automation services in the enterprise sector. With its extensive range of APIs Google can now sew together a wide range of content integration capabilities - including embedded services and database services. With more and more content-oriented capabilities being outsourced by major corporations Google finds itself acquiring more and more basic building blocks to become a future "must-have" technology for enterprises of all sizes. But at this point that's still a future at best - beyond search Google has yet to come up with a killer platform that will be hard for major corporations to resist. Still, it will make it that much harder for competitors like Factiva to dominate in this space as Google becomes more of a go-to source for content and communications behind the firewall.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, enterprise, Google, postini

The New York Hilton was again the setting of this must-attend conference for search professionals focused on implementing search in their organizations. Opening keynoter, Susan Feldman, Research VP of Content Technologies, IDC, framed the dilemna well. Search is hot, and the vendors happy with over 30% growth, busily rolling out new product features. But as the use of search within the enterprise grows, integration with other applications is more important. So enterprise search companies are repositioning as Business Intelligence platforms, rather than solely search. At the time time, other companies in the Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise content Management(ECM), Knowledge Management (KM) spaces are integrating more search capabilities.

For attendees looking to buy their first search engine, Theresa Regli, CMSWatch, described the infrastructure analysis that needs to be done prior to establishing the evaluation framework. She emphasized selection of a search engine involves more than a checklist of features. Jennifer Whalen, Portal Manager, Deloitte, spoke to lessons learned about working with a currently installed search engine (Sharepoint), and no budget for a replacement.

A common themes in the speakers was that search is more than technology. Content and business rules determine successful implementations. Content includes what should be indexed, as well as content types. It comes in the form of unstructured content created at the desktop, but also as structured content found in databases. And increasingly, content includes images, and video content (included in over 20% of current search applications according to the Shore/Information Today report, Enterprise Search, Deployment, Usage and Trends). This was reinforced by the booming attendance at the co-located Streaming Media Conference right next door to Enterprise Search.

Underlying search are the bigger issues of security and compliance. The implications of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) which went to effect on 12/1/2006 were clearly explained by Prudence Zalewski, Software Synthesis. The financial costs involved in the discovery process mandate risk management planning, particularly for email retention! These developments will force a more explicit role and responsibility for search and records management within the organization, and demand for experienced search professions....see you next fall at Enterprise Search West!

Labels: enterprise, events, Jean Bedord, search

Two major conferences focusing on business information services point towards two very different approaches to creating revenues and profits from today's enterprise and media markets. Yet both database publishers and media companies are circling around many of the same opportunities to develop value for business information markets. The battle for the future of business information has just begun in earnest, with no clear winners in sight but with many "old guard" attitudes from both camps in dire need of ejection from the scene.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: Business Information, enterprise, Factiva, LexisNexis, media, News Analysis

Information Today, Inc., Shore Communications, Inc., and respected analyst Jean Bedord recently completed an in-depth study of the dynamic enterprise search marketplace. More than 250 search professionals – users, buyers, and champions of the technology – provided unique insight into the trends driving and shaping enterprise search. This primary market research was supplemented by in-person interviews with representatives of market leading vendors. details and purchasing

Labels: enterprise, ITI, Jean Bedord, Research, search, surveys