An innovative approach to events: vendors get to pitch to live clients. Charlie Terry of Marketresearch.com and Barry Bealer of Really Strategies get to listen to vendor pitches from companies who have called on them acting as fictitious buyers. I'll spare you the details of the vendor pitches but will try to provide some key points. Todd Mickelsen of FAST Search and Transfer pitched their stability, their market momentum and their ability to exceed expectations. Key question posed by Barry: how do we get legacy programmers comfortable with this new technology? Todd focuses on connectors that make it easy to integrate content from legacy systems.

Jean-Paul Chevet of Nstein Technologies pitched from the position of a small company focused primarily on helping publishing companies to be successful in electronic publishing. Put together a portal for Wolters Kluwer that allows users to build a book with just the content that they need. Jean-Paul went into the details, emphasized that the "how" of creating content matters and managing time-to-market for a solution. Audience response: do you need to work with integrators to get these types of technologies? J-P: we have an in-house team, typical implementation 2-5 months with two developers.

Debby Richman outlined the pitch for Collarity, a 2-year old startup that enables improved content discovery through developing clustered communities of interest. A sliding widget on their search interface allows a user to indicate whether they want search results that match their personal profile as well as clustered tag clouds, related content suggestions. The goal is to build natural communities out of generic Web site traffic. They don't charge for the technology, they share in ad revenues.

I am getting second-day live blogging fade, so my apologies for the abbreviated entry. A clever concept for looking at the vendor evaluation process. Overall FAST, being a large incumbent, can come in and say that they solve everything - and in some instances perhaps they can - but the pitch gets bogged down in the usual I.T. box diagrams and doesn't get to business benefits quickly enough. The Nstein pitch is compelling in presenting benefits and payback as well as their real-world expertise with publishing, but needs to tune its implementation success stories. Collarity has a very interesting tool for improving the value of search results in context, but it seems to be the typical tool-as-a-product pitch that needs to focus more on spelling out what the problem is that's being solved up front.

Labels: Collarity, FAST, Nstein, SIIA Content Forum 2007, technology