Enterprise Search Open Day

The Problem with Enterprise Search

Think about search for a moment, and if you're not already convinced it's a problem you soon will be... The short version is that the problems are all about time, and all about money!

Take a look at websites. Yes we all know that fully half of all visitors to a website ignore the navigation your designers painstakingly built for them and go straight for the search box, but it's more than that. If your visitors can't find your products or services, or even the information they want now, they are gone, and feeling pretty grumpy about you too. Does this have a direct impact on your bottom line? Of course!

Take a look at Enterprise Search inside your organisation. How much time do your people waste looking for stuff? Especially when there are deadlines to meet and they need that document they did months or even years ago. And how many times do we simply give up and generate another version of that document...

Take a look at search in Business Processes, in day-to-day workflow - most of the time it's done with humans using 'eyeball search'... you can imagine how much time that wastes.

Of course time is money, so perhaps there is only one problem after all.

Proprietary search systems may look nice and often sound good in the marketing brochure, but they also come with a big price tag and don't often serve well the systems outside the particular vendor's stable of products.

Surely they've figured it out by now?

Proprietary Search has promised much, but delivered little. Proprietary vendors treat search like some kind of secret sauce, and when it doesn't work out-of-the-box like they said it would then good luck getting it to play nicely with your setup. It will need tuning, it will need adjustment, and... hey, what did they say their advantage over Open Source was?

Perhaps the biggest lack of charm of the proprietary route is the complete absence of 'economic scalability'. What we mean by that is that your search needs always grow, usually exponentially. And in the age of big data you should expect that right from the start. If you are being locked into a proprietary pricing model scalability is only one of your problems.

And remember each vendor, quite naturally of course, wants you to use their products and only their products. It's simply the way of the world. Proprietary products are usually designed as one-way streets - you put your stuff in, and it gets locked up and stays there. We call it proprietary lock-in, and it is meant to keep you using that particular product, and make it hard to nearly impossible to move away. Enterprise Search is a problem for you, but a sales tool for your vendor... the problem is not going to be solved that way...

But it's possible, right?

You can have an Enterprise Search solution that serves all of your platforms and technology stacks irrespective of vendor, and serves them all in the same way. Open Source Enterprise Search solutions have solved the fundamental issues of capability, scalability and integrating with systems from all vendors, which means not only can you get equal service for all your systems and reduce your complexity, but you can do it at greatly reduced cost and even eliminate per-user and licencing fees.

What's different now?

The real trick is in knowing how to use the outstandingly great Open Source products out there to their best ability. Open Source Enterprise Search is every bit as capable as Proprietary, in fact it is in the lead and originating all the innovation! In terms of scalability, consider that Twitter handles 2 billion queries a day with open source search and LinkedIn uses open source search to serve its 30 million users! Add to this that you will not be locked into a single vendors stable of products, but can integrate your Open Source Enterprise Search system in with all the systems you use irrespective of vendor.

Next steps...

Come to our Open Day, where not only will we feed you at our delicious Barbecue on our sunny Surrey campus by the side of the historic Wey Canal, you will learn all about Open Source Enterprise Search solutions and how you can use them.

We have assembled the UK's leading Open Source experts, drawn from us and our partners, and respected industry analyst Mike Davis for deep insight into the market. You can read more about the open day here. Read Agenda and Speaker Biographies.

Register online to reserve your place.

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