Any list of major search companies has to include Google. Over the last few years Google has steadily been enhancing the ESA appliance product, and in terms of shipments I would not be surprised if Google has the largest installed base of any search vendor.  The closing keynote on the first day of the conference will be given by Matt Eichner, who is responsible for enterprise search products at Google. Matt is unlikely to be disclosing the ESA installed base but it is very unusual to have such a high-profile Google executive address a conference. Matt’s participation is both a reflection on the reputation of the conference and the commitment of Google to this market.

The closing keynote will be given by Stephen Arnold. If you have not seen Stephen in action then be prepared for verbal fireworks. Stephen tells it like it is, and he has a track record of being spot-on with his forecasts and insights, based on years of tracking the search industry and working on some very complex search projects in the USA and Europe.

It is not only Google that does not disclose installed base information. The entire industry is wrapped in secrecy.  This year Findwise have been undertaking a global survey of search implementation, and the results will be presented at both the Enterprise Search Summit and Enterprise Search Europe conferences. I’ve seen some the initial results but my lips are sealed until Kristian Norling takes to the stage immediately after Paul Doscher’s presentation.

Add in an introduction to search technology from Matt Mullen, a couple of very good panel sessions, almost all the main search vendors participating as sponsors and some of the best case studies we could find, and I’m sure that you will find two days in May well spent in listening and networking at the Hilton Olympia hotel.

Martin White

The IBM business case for the purchase of Vivisimo is based on its ability to support Big Data analysis, but my guess is that this is not all the story.  IBM has seen its major competitors make significant acquisitions in leading-edge search applications and probably decided now was the time to go hunting.  IBM have certainly bought well, but the technology they have bought will be just as useful, if not more so, in the ‘text’ sector as in the Big Data sector.  The one guaranteed outcome of an IBM acquisition is that names vanish, and this will certainly happen to Vivisimo in very short order. Hopefully the core suite of applications will be fairly easily available (both technically and on sensible license terms) to non-IBM customers. If this is not so then we will have lost a very promising search application, especially in federated search.  The other challenge is to convince the Vivisimo team to stay around once they find out what life can be like inside corporate IBM.

These recent acquisitions are good news for the search business overall. Companies like IBM think carefully about what they acquire even if the particular acquisition may have been fast-tracked once other companies vanished from the deck. I think it shows that enterprise clients of IBM, Oracle and HP are looking for a good search experience from the viewpoint of users, administrators and IT developers, and until the recent acquisitions the level of search awareness and competence inside these large IT vendors was not especially brilliant. Perhaps now IBM sales people will  go on a search course and understand just a little more about what they are selling.  It will be interesting to see if the Vivisimo blog survives. The quality was excellent but although the list of blog entries gave the name of the blogger the name then vanished when you went to the full entry!

Martin White

A virtual team is formed when at least one of the members of the team works in a different location, time zone or culture. Virtual teams have been used for many years and a significant amount of knowledge has been built up about good practices in managing virtual teams and in particular managing virtual meetings.  However many of the reports, papers, conferences and books on collaboration and social media seem to assume that team working only takes place between people working in the same company, the same country and speaking the same language. Research published in the 2012 Digital Workplace Trends report suggests that over 75% of companies with more than 50,000 employees run into problems with language and culture in team working.

The report sets out ten recommendations on how to make effective use of virtual teams and virtual team meetings and there is a resources section listing books, research papers and web sites.

Have a look at  our information sheet  Managing Virtual Teams – Seminars and Workshops  for details of our seminars and workshops on this subject.

Martin White

At the conference Kristian Norling (Findwise) will be presenting the results of a global enterprise search survey that Findwise have developed. So far the team have only had time to crunch through the first 100 replies.  From these initial results 38% report that there is no budget for search and 48% that there is less than one person supporting the search application.  The survey is open to the end of April so it is not too late to complete the survey if you have not yet done so. There is so little reliable information about search implementation that any input you can provide will be invaluable to the search community worldwide and to you personally. At least you will be able to benchmark your own situation, and that could help you in developing a business case to gain more resources.

The enterprise search business is going through an interesting period. Last year HP acquired Autonomy and Oracle acquired Endeca. Oracle seemed to have moved much more quickly than HP in integrating Endeca into its product suite. Then a month ago Lexmark (formerly the printer division of IBM) announced the acquisition of Isys-Search, the Australian-based enterprise search business. I like the commentary on the Lexmark acquisition by Miles Kehoe at New Idea Engineering.  I think it’s a good move for Isys-Search provided Lexmark don’t kill the business with corporate overheads and take a long term view. In my experience many IT managers are worried about whether small but good search vendors will survive. They want to know that the company is going to be around for a few years. The Lexmark ownership of Isys-Search should reassure them.

What is not going to be around is Microsoft FAST ESP 5.3.  Mainstream support for this product ceases in July 2013, and remember that there has been no development on the product since around 2008. It is invisible on Microsoft corporate web sites and my understanding is that you now cannot buy it. Among the many impressive features of FAST ESP was its scalability and that is a difficult act to match. Many organisations are considering a migration to Apache Lucene and TNR Global have published a good briefing paper on upgrade options using open-source software.

I’m sure that these and many more topics will be the subject of presentations, panel sessions and quiet conversations with exhibitors at Enterprise Search Europe, and also at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York earlier in May. For an in-depth analysis of the main search applications do read the recently-updated Real Story Group report on enterprise search

Martin White

Now Martin Schmettow has written a paper in the April 2012 issue of Communications of the ACM  in which he reviewes all the literature on test sizes for usability testing. His conclusion is that not only is 10 +/- 2  too low, but that there is no ‘magic number’ for usability tests. If that is the bad news the good news is that there are approaches which can indicate the number of undiscovered usability problems from the initial outcomes of testing.  This may seem improbable but there is a well-established precedent in the capture-recapture methodologies for quality management in software development.

Schmettow’s paper is a very detailed analysis of the problems in arriving at usability test sizes and rather than try to summarise it in this blog post I would recommend you download it from Schmettow’s site on Mendeley. It is well worth reading. The main message is that we should not be complacent about undertaking small-scale usability tests and assuming that from these we have found all usability problems. Nielsen indicates that a sample size of 5 may only find 85% of usability issues, and that raises the issue about whether or not the 15% that are not identified are in fact more important to identify and solve than the 85% which have been found.

Martin White

Over the last decade intranet investment has focused on providing support to employees based in offices. Most organisations have a substantial number of employees who are almost constantly on the road, working with suppliers, customers and prospects. There is now the capability to deliver a wide range of information content and services (notably collaboration) to these employees, making use of a combination of smartphone, tablet and pc devices. The need to support a BYOD policy means that employees may well start asking why their organisation is being slow to move into mobile services when they see competitors being more innovative and committed to this approach.

In 2013 Apple will probably be releasing the next version of its iPad, Microsoft will be launching Windows 8 and Office 15 with strong mobile capabilities and 4G/LTE broadband services will be widely available in the USA and starting to be rolled out in Europe. Not all organisations will need to invest in mobile-ready websites, intranets and other enterprise applications, but for many others the quality of their mobile services offering to employees in 2013 could have significant business 0utcomes.

In our new Research Note we highlight the outcomes of a number of recent research reports, consider issues such as information security, Apple’s enterprise strategy and the dark side of mobility and make ten recommendations for actions that should be taken in 2012 within the context of planning for enterprise mobile delivery in 2013.

Martin White

From an enterprise perspective the major change is support for 4G LTE, with 73Mbs download speeds on LTE. However 4G LTE comes in some different varieties and it’s not clear from the presentation if all the decoders needed are bundled in or whether for now the products will just support local markets. What might be of value is the ability of the iPad3 to act as a personal hotspot and support up to five other devices. What was also not clear from the presentation was what the future of the iPad2 would be. The price for the 16MB model is reported to be coming down to $399, which is not going to be good news for the Android tablet business.

The iPad3 will certainly continue to set the specification benchmark for tablets. Others will catch up but by then Apple will have shipped millions of units, giving it a dominance that is difficult to see being challenged. Corporate IT departments will probably be reassured by the level of commitment of Apple to the tablet format and the availability of 4G LTE even if in Europe 4G LTE network coverage is very poor. The USA are way ahead in this respect.

What impressed me about the launch was the level of security around the specification of the iPad3. There were some leaks, but nothing of any significance. This is where Apple’s supply chain management comes in. The cash mountain that the company has enables it to commit to large scale long-term deals that manufacturers value very highly even if there is a great deal of pressure on margins.  Because of this Apple can impose absolute bans on disclosure that seemingly cannot be matched even by the security services if Wikileaks is anything to go by.

I’m personally pleased that the iPad3 was announced today as I’m just finishing our March Research Note on Enterprise Mobile developments that will be published later this month.

Martin White

By May this year we should know a lot more about the search business and search implementation practices as the result of a superb survey which has been developed by Kristian Norling and his colleagues at Findwise, with some help from a number of search managers and consultants around the world.  The survey is now available for completion. It may take around 20 minutes to do so, but I would encourage you to spend the time no matter how small your search implementation. The web survey has good internal logic to take you from section to section. You may find yourself having to dig out information from others that perhaps you should have known already!

The top-level results will be presented at the Enterprise Search Summit, New York (for North America) and Enterprise Search Europe, London for Europe and the rest of the world. The full analysis will be available in due course, but it is going to take Findwise quite a while to dig beneath the surface of the results. This is a major investment of time from a small company that will be of global benefit to search vendors and search managers so do please recognise this investment by completing the survey. There are 6500 members of the Enterprise Search Engine Professionals LinkedIn Group so would it be too much to expect 1000 responses? Your response could make the difference between 999 and 1000 so please click today.

Thank you

Martin White

We can promise you that this will not be a ‘sit on a line and take notes’ workshop.  You will be sitting at round tables, and we have ways of making sure that by the end of the day you will have met everyone else in the room and created new collaborative networks of your own. We have been asked if this is a SharePoint workshop and the answer is no. The workshop is technology agnostic, and indeed the first session is about taking an analytic look at the technology you have and making the best of it. The workshop schedule will be based around the timetable that Michael publishes on his site, adapted to reflect the particular interests of attendees.

If you would like to make a booking or need more information about the workshop please email me at martin.white@intranetfocus.com.  Booking closes on 2 March, and we’ve only got room for 6 tables = 30 delegates.

Martin White

I’m now beginning to see movement on the part of some really major players in the IT business towards providing intranet solutions.  A brief summary.

• Microsoft Office 365 is certainly offering intranet capabilities, and you can be sure that these will only get better in time as Office 15 and SharePoint 15 emerge in a year or so
• Google is positioning Google Sites as being an intranet solution and companies the scale of Roche are adopting Google Apps as a quasi-intranet
• LinkedIn is being quoted as starting to look at the intranet market, interestingly in an interview with the MD Europe
• Apple has not made any announcements that I have seen but the level of iPad use may persuade them that there could be a service to offer. Remember that Apple have excellent statistics on the apps that people have downloaded and so have an decent view on the tasks that iPad users are undertaking.

A major factor in all this is the potential requirement for mobile intranets and the flexibility of cloud applications, which all four companies understand very well.  Many small businesses have most of their staff on the road (I’m thinking of my local carpet fitter) and only a couple of people at the office. Forrester and the Aberdeen Group both see collaboration as a key requirement for mobile workers, and that is about collaboration with each other not specifically HQ.  Collaboration is good but often requires access to documents and other applications, rather than just microblogging and staff directories.  Somewhere there might even be an opportunity for HP now that it is planning to embed Automony search in printers and other office devices.

I’m not yet sure where all this is leading at present. All four companies listed above have excellent brand reputations, very deep pockets and a lot of patience and when they do commit to a new service they put a lot of effort behind it. Perhaps the intranet age is only just starting!

Martin White