September 2, 2011

Market Overview: Enterprise Search

by Leslie Owens for Content & Collaboration Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

September 2, 2011

Market Overview: Enterprise Search

by Leslie Owens with Stephen Powers and anjali yakkundi

Google, Microsoft, and autonomy Face Credible Competitors

ExECut i v E S u M Ma ry
Forrester evaluated 12 enterprise search vendors that vary widely in their brand awareness, cost, and ease of use. Google, Autonomy, and Microsoft are the most well-known names; they own a large portion of the existing market. However, the other nine vendors in this evaluation also have capable products worth examining. Coveo and Vivisimo specialize in customer service; Attivio, Exalead, and Endeca in custom applications to merge structured and unstructured information; Sinequa and IBM in semantics; ISYS in OEM; and Fabasoft in eGovernment. Enterprise search vendors have elevated and deconstructed what search is and can be. The demand for relevant retrieval of corporate information remains strong, and the final chapter of this competitive albeit mature market has yet to be determined.

tabL E O F CO n tE ntS
2 What Search Buyers Need Is Not What Search Vendors Sell 2 Products Fall Into Three Categories: Specialized, Integrated, And Detached Some Search Products Fall Outside Of typical Knowledge Management use Cases 4 Edge Functionality Differentiates Mature Products 6 Search Software Vendor Profiles
rECOMMEndatiOnS

n Ot E S & rE S O u rCE S
Forrester asked 12 vendors to demonstrate their capabilities and complete questionnaires about their features, financials, and executive strategy. Forrester surveyed customer references provided by the vendors and spoke with approximately 50 end user companies over the past year via inquiry and consulting engagements.

Related Research Documents Enterprise Search: Six Key trends to Watch april 11, 2011
tapping the Power Of Search-based applications March 14, 2011 Q&a: Search Fundamentals For information and Knowledge Management Pros March 18, 2010

9 Match Your Vendor With Your Information Management Enthusiasm 10 Supplemental Material

2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forresters Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

WhAT SEARCh BuYERS NEED IS NOT WhAT SEARCh VENDORS SELL Search tools aim to solve a well-known and critical problem information overload. Yet few CIOs see enterprise search as a fundamental service to deploy to their workforce similar to email.1 Unless this shift occurs, vendors cant position their wares around knowledge worker efficiency and expect to make a sale. As a result many search vendors are guilty of over-intellectualizing what search can do pushing conceptual and optimized decision dashboards for example, when workers simply want enterprise search. Operating systems, collaboration tools, email clients, and enterprise content management (ECM) systems have decent retrieval capabilities. Is there even a need for enterprise search software? Yes. Enterprise search comes into play when no primary repository exists. It is a key component of an Information Workplace (IW) strategy that organizations build to unify their diverse information environments.2 Enterprise search lets workers find information in heterogeneous sources and can also serve as a development platform to build custom search-driven applications.3 PRODuCTS FALL INTO ThREE CATEgORIES: SPECIALIzED, INTEgRATED, AND DETAChED Forrester categorizes the market as follows:

Specialized search vendors. This category includes vendors that position search as a strategic

investment to solve a specific problem, such as accessing and analyzing information within a particular business function, like customer support or supply chain. These vendors see great promise in industry-specific and role-specific search-based applications and in search as a supplement to business intelligence (BI) investments. Vendors in this category include Attivio, Coveo, Endeca, Exalead, Sinequa, and Vivisimo.

Integrated search vendors. Vendors such as Autonomy, IBM, and Microsoft have merged

search capabilities with other information management functionality (e.g., web content management, archiving, content analytics, and collaboration). These vendors do sell search independently from their other products, but their vision is to push search deep into and across the Information Workplace stack. When infrastructure vendors acquire specialized search vendors, they will join this category.

Detached search vendors. This group of vendors including Google, ISYS, and Fabasoft

focuses on ease of deployment and flexibility. Google dominates this category with its handsoff appliance. ISYS has deconstructed its offering into adaptable components for end users and other vendors to buy. And Fabasoft focuses on its secure service-oriented architecture for eGovernment buyers.

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

For this evaluation, we focused on technology that provides query-based access to secure and open information of varying quality stored in heterogeneous information sources. Since many features are standard across all search products (such as faceted search for explicit metadata), Forrester centered this overview on ease of development and looked for rich extras (like analytics) that enable compelling search experiences (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 Evaluated Enterprise Search vendors
Vendor Autonomy Attivio Coveo Endeca Exalead Fabasoft Google IBM Evaluated product Autonomy IDOL 7 Attivio AIE 1.3 Coveo Platform 6.5 Latitude 2 CloudView 5.1 Mindbreeze 5.0 Google Search Appliance (GSA) 6.8 IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search 2.2

ISYS Search Enterprise Server v9.7 Microsoft Sinequa Vivisimo

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FAST Search for SharePoint Server 2010 Sinequa ES 7 Velocity 8.0

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Some Search Products Fall Outside Of Typical Knowledge Management use Cases The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Search, Q2 2008, report included Recommind and InQuira, which fit into the specialized category but now primarily target specific use cases (law firms and customer service knowledge management, respectively) outside of our broad evaluation scenarios.4 Oracle, OpenText, and SAP sell search solutions and fall into the integrated search vendor category, but their products are only relevant for customers with an entrenched commitment to their portal and/or lineof-business applications. Open source Lucene/Solr is a key element of consumer web experiences like Netflix, but it isnt viable for most enterprise scenarios due to lack of track record and/or in-house deployment expertise.5 BA Insight and Concept Searching augment Microsofts products with connectors, document previews, and autoclassification but dont offer standalone search. And vendors like Adobe and SLI Systems focus on customer-facing site search instead of enterprise search.

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

EDgE FuNCTIONALITY DIFFERENTIATES MATuRE PRODuCTS Content and collaboration (C&C) professionals who manage enterprise search initiatives cope with diverse information of questionable quality; they need to show value quickly and often have limited resources. Therefore, Forrester evaluated the products with a focus on the ease of designing and deploying secure and compelling experiences in different environments, with administrator-based tools and social and self-learning functionality (see Figure 2). In many cases, differentiation regarding flexibility and complexity emerged through product demos (see Figure 3). The final scorecard took into consideration the vendor demos, customer feedback, and their listed functionality (see Figure 4).
Figure 2 vendors Were Evaluated On 10 Criteria
Evaluation criteria Mobile support Federation model Indexing and connectivity Explanation Number of supported platforms and browsers; security model; number of customers; available query input mechanisms Query execution across multiple indices; single result response; maintain authentication; current implementation size; includes federated connectors Indexing pipeline tools and processes; data access mechanisms; included connectors; support for connectors; quality control; ease of administration

Social and collaborative features User behavior impacts relevance; social tags and ratings support; recommendations; saved search Management and analysis Security Administration options; out-of-box analysis and reporting tools; integration between search analytics; search experience and web analytics Access control support; integration across multiple directories for authentication; secure search of line of business apps, exibility to map and modify security Taxonomy management; native autoclassi cation; entity extraction; data calculations and analysis features; visualization of patterns, trends, and relationships; export semantic structure for use in information management systems Prebuilt templates, interfaces, and design components; WSISYG tools to customize the interface business console, testing. Tune and bias search results; dynamic relevance tuning based on user behavior; custom relevance models Language-speci c APIs; web services connectivity; prepackaged integration with multiple market-leading portals; SDK for custom development; support di erent operating systems
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Semantics/text analytics

Interface exibility Relevance model Platform readiness

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

Figure 3 the required demo Script Emulated Common Enterprise Scenarios

Scenario 1: Administration Step 1: Con gure product to crawl and index new source Step 2: Con gure search to support several sign-on domains Step 3: Identify and exclude speci c con dential content from index Step 4: Create results page to serve diverse content

Scenario 2: Step 1: Front-end search experience Query and interact with the results; show all key elements and describe the mechanisms that produce results Scenario 3: Optimization Step 1: Step 2: Options to enrich, Tune search and harmonize, and test relevance cleanse information Step 3: Modify the behavior and appearance of the end user search experience Step 4: Build role-based and interest-based relevance models and result elements

Scenario 4: Maintenance

Step 1: Analyze, troubleshoot, x, and report on performance issues (e.g., query response time)

Step 2: Create and run customized reports to show performance against business and IT performance indicators
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

Figure 4 todays Enterprise Search Market Offers a variety Of Solutions

rc h ic ro so ft Si ne qu a Vi vi si m o M on o Co my ve o

ca Ex al ea d Fa ba so Go f t og le IB M

iv io

de

Mobile support Federation model Indexing and connectivity Social and collaborative features Management and analysis Security Semantics/text analytics Interface exibility Relevance model Platform readiness Key to capability comparison Excellent
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At t

Very good

Good

Fair

Poor
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

SEARCh SOFTWARE VENDOR PROFILES

Attivio. Attivio focuses on mining and integrating diverse data. The product augments business

intelligence solutions with more business-friendly query, analysis, and visualization capabilities. The product does not ship with multiple interface templates; customers use Attivios platform to develop custom search-based applications such as a key performance indicator dashboard. An improved administrative GUI and new connector GUI are forthcoming. Attivio fits the needs of people like regulatory professionals at financial services firms who want to monitor the impact of changing conditions with a dashboard enabled by SQL and keyword queries.

Autonomy. Autonomy is an established player with robust functionality; it has been at the

forefront of trends like multimedia search, intent-based recommendations, and hierarchical facet blending. But it lacks transparent product management practices, making it difficult for customers to plan their road maps; there has not been a major version release in more than five years. Also, clients report difficulty with its connectors. IDOL has particularly strong security features and has a robust Control Center where administrators can set up watchlists to track production issues. IDOL is not for amateurs, but the product does offer a simplified interface

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IS YS

Au t

En

Se a

Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

into some intricate functionality, such as relevance tuning, and provides a range of APIs for integration with other applications. IDOL requires a significant financial investment and a dedicated administration team to operate to its full potential.

Coveo. Coveo has evolved from an entry-level solution in our last evaluation to a strong, full-

featured player.6 It offers intuitive templates to design results pages with prebuilt components like pie charts, robust security options, and a solid mobile strategy. The reporting add-on module is best-of-breed. Coveo does not support Linux operating systems and plans to address its current limited semantic capabilities in its release later this year. Customers praise the vendors responsiveness and ability to solve problems. Coveo is good fit for enterprises that want a .NET development platform for custom search-based applications.

Endeca. Endeca focuses on enhancing business intelligence (BI) solutions with interactive

analytical views of data. Endecas faceted navigation allows information workers to navigate through data to refine their query and eliminate what they dont want to see.7 Thanks to the eCommerce side of its business, Endeca is far ahead of other vendors in terms of relevance tuning and role-based profiling; others dont come close to matching these capabilities. Although its capabilities support knowledge management type buyers, Endeca has decided to focus on agile business intelligence instead of intranet search.

Exalead. Exalead is a relatively new face in the enterprise search landscape, with longtime roots
in web search. Recently acquired by Dassault Systemes, it remains an independent subsidiary. Exalead seeks to displace legacy products for those who want to develop semantically rich search-based applications. Its strength lies in its mashup builder, with a library of widgets that search administrators can lay out on a page and set with different relevance models.

Fabasoft. Fabasoft offers an entry-level cloud-based and on-premises search solution, available
as an appliance. The vendor holds security certifications (SDK, SAS 70, and ISO 2001) that have helped it penetrate the European government market. Its additional reporting tool (app. telemetry) is strong. Available as a download on the Web, Fabasoft offers a quick time-to-value for organizations that are seeking access to well-known information types in well-known systems, such as Microsoft Exchange. It is compatible with the online collaboration tool, Folio, from the same vendor.

Google. Google has a thoughtful, comprehensive vision for search that includes the cloud and

the desktop and is on the cutting edge with self-learning social features. Its search appliance incorporates a wide range of relevance signals with the option to assign relevance contextual to different environments. Frequent refresh cycles for the appliance help customers stay ahead of trends. However, C&C pros should beware that Google currently doesnt offer entity extraction or information cleansing capabilities. Customers warn that Google is reluctant to support its third-party connectors, which vary in quality. Google is best for pragmatic organizations that dont want to commit resources to care and feed enterprise search.

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

For Content & Collaboration Professionals

IBM. A new offering, Content Analytics, packages IBMs search and analytics functionality

into a single product. The search component is based on Lucene and has decent administrative tools but lags behind other products social features, relevance tuning, and reporting tools. One customer noted difficulty integrating Content Analytics with IBMs other products, particularly its portal offering, and this doesnt bode well for more heterogeneous integration. Since semantics and search are two sides of the same coin, the promise of a converged product will appeal to buyers who want to see patterns and trends in their information as well as retrieve specific documents. However, at this point the product is limited.

ISYS. A longtime player with deep expertise at retrieval, ISYS is resilient. ISYS builds and

maintains native support for its file formats, container formats, and connectors. The product offers document previews on the fly, efficient boost/block functionality, and solid management and analysis tools. ISYS appeals to organizations that want a straightforward, less expensive product to address core requirements as well as to information vendors that look to embed high performance search in their solution.

Microsoft. Microsoft offers standalone and integrated search solutions for both internal

and customer-facing scenarios. As a search product that integrates with a hugely successful collaboration platform, FAST Search for SharePoint Server 2010, the most up to date offering, has an edge over competitors. This platform integration makes some functions e.g., authentication and authorization, people finding particularly easy. While FAST Search for SharePoints content processing and multilingual capabilities are strong, the product has conspicuous functionality gaps: a number of common administration functions (e.g., relevance tuning) require complex coding through PowerShell. Organizations with enterprise license agreements and large SharePoint implementations will want to consider FAST Search for SharePoint Server 2010 because it enhances general productivity search and enables search application development on top of SharePoint.

Sinequa. Sinequa is an emerging player with several significant production instances in

terms of scalability and performance. Sinequas greatest strength and key differentiator lies in its impressive linguistic and semantic functionality, such as finding conceptually similar documents and cleansing heterogeneous information. It supports more than 100 internally developed connectors to information systems but does not support federation to other systems. The biggest gaps in functionality are a clunky reporting tool and limited interface design support. For the financially conscious buyer seeking an enterprise search solution, Sinequa is competitively priced with a rich feature set. As one happy reference stated: The company is big enough to cope and small enough to care.

Vivisimo. Vivisimo scored well across all of Forresters evaluation criteria. It sells a packaged
search-based application for enterprise customer experience professionals, and offers its platform as a framework for custom application development. Vivisimo provides a range of

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documented APIs to the system. Customers report that the product is easy to use, even for more complex functions such as federated search of external repositories and creating spotlights, but one customer expressed concern with the limited third-party professional services ecosystem. Vivisimos social search and user experience capabilities stand out; the product ships with multiple templates to design results pages and add different skins. Although search is a mature technology, it is not a solved problem.8 In particular, the boundaries of what you search (paid content, cloud content, data, email, rich media) are endless. Until standards like OpenSearch allow pain-free federation and vendors take advantage of unstructured information management architecture (UIMA) to manage unstructured information, the cost of your licensing and services agreement is proportional to the robustness of your strategy. In short, the scope of search initiative drives the price. In fact, in the next few years, we expect prices to rise as specialized vendors wax poetic on the transformative power of search in order to distinguish their products from Google and Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint. Over time Forrester expects that specialized vendors will settle into their niche (e.g., BI, customer service, eDiscovery) and/or infrastructure vendors will acquire them. C&C professionals will craft a vision for information access that balances social blurbs with formal documents, established team hierarchy with self-declared expertise, open information with secure information, and structured data with unstructured content. The vendors in this report offer different paths to realize this vision.

r E C O M M E n d at i O n S

MATCh YOuR VENDOR WITh YOuR INFORMATION MANAgEMENT ENThuSIASM

Forrester clients in the midst of vendor selection often say things like Since no one hit it out of the park, it has come down to cost. vendors know this so they adapt their pricing structure (by size, volume, sources, users) in competitive bids. Forrester talks with many C&C pros who have implemented the so-called best solution (i.e., autonomy) yet still struggle to deliver an effective retrieval experience because they lack established processes for security, taxonomy, and retention, and dont have a team in place to run such complex software. the quality of your search experience reflects the discipline with which your organization manages information. When choosing a search vendor, C&C pros should:

Be firm on vision. dont let a vendor tell you that your requirements arent valid. if you have
done enough research to be sure you need a feature like social ratings or functionality like federation, find a vendor that is of the same mind.

Do a proof of concept. With a proof of concept, youll learn how easy it is to connect to
your organizations specific environment, the fit between your culture and the vendor

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Market Overview: Enterprise Search

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representatives, what components are custom developed, what sacrifices have to be made to meet a deadline, and what optional extras to consider.

get agreement during the sales cycle on what to expect from future interactions. Get
explicit definition of training, support, and services. What is the distinction between paid consulting activities and included maintenance activities? Will professional services be from a third party or the vendor?

Meet your vendor semi-annually to coordinate your road map and the product road
map. demand fair notice before the product shifts in direction (i.e., moves to the cloud) or when support for things you rely on (i.e., Linux) is discontinued. network with peers on communities like Forresters C&C community or Linkedins Search Engine Professionals group to learn from early adopters and innovators and anticipate emerging requirements.

understand that technology is only a piece of the puzzle. C&C pros who run successful
search projects focus first on the fundamentals. they spend time with business stakeholders to understand the top findability pain points, scope search to target particular content of high quality, buy enough hardware to meet performance expectations, promote information governance best practices, and design an elegant experience.

SuPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Methodology All participating vendors in this report were required to:

Respond to a questionnaire. Vendors were sent two questionnaires. The first questionnaire

focused on available functionality and was designed to show differentiation in the marketplace. It asked vendors to describe their key features and capabilities. The second questionnaire focused on the vendors market strategy. This survey focused on product road map, vision of the marketplace, and future plans.

Provide three enterprise customer references. Vendors were asked to provide contact

information for three confidential enterprise customers using the evaluated version of the solution. Customers were asked questions about ease of implementation, out-of-the-box functionality, amount of customization and investment into the product, and overall satisfaction.

Conduct a product demonstration. Forrester provided participants with a compulsory script.

These specific steps were meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the solution. Demos lasted 60 minutes. The first 50 minutes were allotted to the compulsory script, leaving the last 10 minutes to demonstrate any additional and unique features that differentiated their solution from the competition. Vendors were required to only show features that were available by April 26, 2011.

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11

ENDNOTES
1

Forty-seven percent of 934 North American and European I&KM decision-makers surveyed are implementing or planning to implement information access software; 84% of this base are implementing or planning to implement on-premises email (email servers located in your own data center) Source: Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2010. With knowledge worker efficiency looming as the next great competitive differentiator, organizations are investing heavily in communication tools like instant messaging (IM), web conferencing software-based video and audioconferencing, collaboration workspaces, content management solutions, search tools, social networking tools, and more. Knowledge workers must make sense of all of these disparate technologies while trying to get their jobs done. See the October 29, 2010, The Information Workplace Light Burns Brighter report. Search-based applications (SBA) are built for specific people and processes with clear requirements such as customer support reps who need quick answers to technical questions. Content pros can more easily measure the business impact of an SBA because they are fitto-purpose. See the March 14, 2011, Tapping The Power Of Search-Based Applications report. In July 2011, Oracle announced an agreement to acquire InQuira to enhance its Oracle Fusion CRM Service. Source: Oracle buys InQuira, Oracle press release, July 28, 2011 (http://www.oracle.com/us/ corporate/press/444382). Recommind sells full-text concept search solutions for eDiscovery and enterprise search scenarios. Although the majority of its customers are law firms, it also has some enterprise customers.

Services firms such as Acquity Group, Flax, Lucid Imagination, and Siteworx build custom applications using Lucene/Solr for enterprise clients. Lucid Imagination offers a certified distribution of Lucene/Solr for open source developers called LucidWorks Enterprise. Forrester evaluated 11 enterprise search vendors against 147 criteria. For past Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders, see the May 28, 2008, The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Search, Q2 2008 report. Earlier-generation BI technologies and architecture, while still useful for more stable BI applications, fall short in the ever-faster race of changing business requirements. Forrester recommends embracing Agile BI to tackle agility and flexibility opportunities. Alternative database management system (DBMS) engines architected specifically for Agile BI will emerge as one of the compelling Agile BI technologies business process pros should closely evaluate and consider for specific use cases. See the May 27, 2011, Its The Dawning Of The Age Of BI DBMS report. Search technology is mature and stable; for the most part, bottlenecks regarding scale, security, and connectivity can be easily resolved. So the trends to watch focus on strategy, not technology. In 2011, content and collaboration (C&C) professionals responsible for search will position themselves as trusted advisors to the business, add value to the social output of empowered employees, and confront content quality problems head-on. See the April 11, 2011, Enterprise Search: Six Key Trends To Watch report.

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