Byrne Tony Byrne

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Some small search vendors really do fade away

27-Sep-2006

Tags: Enterprise Search, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, , Secure Enterprise Search 11g

In the last year or so, we've seen a couple of small enterprise search vendors disappear. First, Speed of Mind, an innovative Danish vendor that indexed Oracle text columns before Oracle figured out how to do it adequately themselves, and, more recently, Entopia, which tried to integrate social network analysis and several other buzzwords into the enterprise search experience. Normally, we don't subscribe to the general tenor of FUD around small vendors. In fact, "viability" frequently gets overweighted in product selection decisions. Nevertheless, there is a difference between, say, a small, inexpensive CMS vendor with a broad customer base, and niche search vendor with an pricey offering and smallish customer base. The former codebase can achieve staying power by dint of the sizable maintenance revenue, despite what happens to the vendor; the latter codebase is much more perishable when no one wants to support a limited clientele.

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