This week, Autonomy announced that German call center provider Quelle.Contact has chosen its IDOL product "...to power its new Content Management System (CMS)." Hold on -- wasn't Autonomy in the enterprise search business?

Though the enterprise search market is growing steadily, it's not growing fast enough to accommodate huge sustained expansion rates for every vendor. If you're a venture capitalist or hedge fund maven, you're not looking for just a couple of bucks -- you want to make it big in return for the risk you're taking.

The reality is that every search vendor's software does two things -- index and query -- which are in practice very hard, but seem to the world like simple commodity services. Perhaps that's why, in researching the upcoming new edition of the Enterprise Search Report, search vendors have been telling me they do lots of things: their software is a platform, or it's really business intelligence, or maybe knowledge management -- almost anything but search. If pressed, they might call it "information access" or "discovery," but "search" has become a four-letter word, especially to the largest vendors.

Autonomy may therefore be pleased that financial analysts picked up on the news as a "content management system deal." It turns out, however, that IDOL is used to federate search across multiple repositories for Quelle. To be fair, Autonomy acknowledged to me they don't actually do the CMS bit. It's not a big deal when investors get confused, but as a customer, you are well advised to stay focused on the core competencies of your suppliers.