No drastic changes to the industry were observed at this year’s Enterprise Search Summit (#ESS12) in New York. Despite the fact that there wasn’t anything ground breaking there are still some industry trends that continue to prevail.
Open Source Search
Open source search technology continues to evolve and must be considered as a legitimate option for many organizations. The open source search community is now standardizing and continuing to develop more sound solutions. In addition, there are more third party open source experts that can assist with ongoing support and maintenance of your open source search applications (Norconex, being one of them). The open source search player’s presence was felt this year.
“It’s not all about the technology”
We heard this consistently throughout many of the presentations taking place. The technology is obviously important; however, it is not everything. Other important factors include, but are not limited to the following:
- “Don’t build for the technology, build for the user” – Daniel Webster (Summit 7 Systems)
- “Build the right team. The team is more important than the technology” – Christian Vogt (Raytion)
- “CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT. You have to get a hold of your content” – Ed Dale (Ernst & Young)
Enterprise Search is Mature, but ..
Enterprise search technology is pretty mature now. From a product, technology, and professional services standpoint, there really wasn’t anything revolutionary at this year’s Enterprise Search Summit in New York. This might not be surprising for those of you who deal with Enterprise Search on a daily basis. However, what is surprising is the rate at which organizations are adopting enterprise search internally.
Perhaps the most intriguing information presented at this year’s conference in New York came from the Report on Enterprise Search Adoption Survey. The survey interviewed 170 respondents globally. Vendors and integrators were EXCLUDED. 50% of respondents came from the Public Sector and the other 50% came from the Private sector. Some highlights from the findings include:
- 45% of respondents say search does not have its own budget
- 15% of respondents say they don’t know if search has its own budget
- 50% of respondents say they have less than 1 employee working with search
- ONLY 14% of organizations have a search strategy in place
Enterprise search is often a small piece of a much larger content or information management initiative. However, it’s often the best and easiest place to start, so start now!
“Bad Search = Low Productivity” – Marianne Sweeny (Search Analyst).
Mike Clark
Mike has spent his entire career in a sales and business development capacity. Prior to joining the team at Norconex Mike worked in the competitive IT staffing industry. His private and public sector sales and business development experience is a definite asset when positioning Norconex products and specialized professional services to existing and future clients.