At the AIIM Expo in Boston and Documation Paris earlier this month, I met with several enterprise search vendors, old and new. There's a growing movement afoot to de-throne the old guard; talk of replacing FAST and Autonomy seemed to be uttered by every vendor that wasn't a household name.

It started with Attivio, which is full of defectors from FAST, convinced they can do search better. "We're fixing everything that used to bug our customers," said Andrew McKay, SVP of products, speaking of his days at FAST. He spoke at length about statistical analysis, probability, and the company's focus on standard search with a business intelligence context -- talking with such speed, I wondered if he'd stop to breathe. A lot of the value proposition sounded Autonomy-esque. Their booth was smartly and strategically placed next to Google's, which no doubt got them foot traffic. There's already a lot of hub-bub about Attivio out there, but as of AIIM, they had only one customer thus far. We'll see how the hype measures up once the technology is out there for a while and customers can tell us how it really works.

In Paris, I admit my surprise at the number of local enterprise search vendors on display, including Antidot and Polyspot; proof that there's no shortage of local, eager-to-please vendors in just about every geography. Most have only been around for a few years. I chatted at length with François D'Haegeleer of Sinequa (founded in 2000), a company that's been picking up customers in Europe, and thus gains our watchful eye. Their heavy focus on linguistic analysis (with a quarter of their team consisting of linguistic researchers) seems to appeal to the language-loving French, and Sinequa's technology has already replaced Autonomy's at couple of major French press agencies, including Les Echos. The company also just opened an office in London, where fellow French search vendor Exalead established a footprint some time ago. Will the French triumph north of the channel, or will it be another Waterloo?

"Nous sommes la nouvelle vague d'Enterprise Search," D'Haegeleer said, and I stood amused by the metaphor, and also baffled by the choice of the terms the French choose to translate vs. not (other vendors said "moteurs de recherche d'entreprise"). Controlled vocabularies, anyone?

Characterized by self-conscious rejection of conservative paradigms and a spirit of youthful iconoclasm, the New Wave of French cinema took the world by storm, emphasizing the triumph of the individual. Will the individual searchers of enterprise information triumph from the new wave of enterprise search? Are these new products really more "lightweight" than the heavyweights of the search world? It's too early to tell, and we won't render judgment before hearing from customers who've worked with the technology for a time. Stay tuned, we'll keep you posted on these vendors and the others we cover as we update our Enterprise Search Report throughout the year.