Within the last week, two statements from industry analysts and consultants caught our attention:

“Enterprise search still sucks”

and

“Enterprise search is a myth … it doesn’t exist”

The former statement is attributed to Dan Keldsen’s BizTechTalk post of last week, in which he touches on some of the early findings from his (AIIM’s) Market IQ study on Findability.  The telling metric in Dan’s post states that 69 percent of respondents say that less than half of their enterprise information is searchable.  Obviously, you can’t find it if the document you care about is not even in your search engine’s index.

Coincidentally, AIIM’s findings feed nicely into the latter statement above, which came from Steve Arnold during his keynote session with Lynda Moulton at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco last week.  His contention is “enterprise search” is a stupid phrase that has no meaning, since you’d be hard-pressed to find a single organization that lets every user search every shred of enterprise content.  What Steve would tell you is if you came across such an animal, said organization would be sitting on a serious security breach situation.

Having been in the game since 1988, ISYS has watched the terminology used to describe our industry bounce around like pinball, and to be quite honest, we’re happy with enterprise search as our marquee descriptor.  It’s simple to say, easy to market and makes a fairly illustrative distinction between itself and its broader “world wide web search” cousin.

But Steve is right — search really is much more tactical than the big platform and infrastructure vendors would have you believe.  Pain points are always going to be higher within one group or business unit, and hence these groups are much more ready to adopt search techology and prove its value.  In the coming days, we will post Part Two in our series of White Papers, in which we discuss search as an iterative process, so stay tuned. 

This Thursday (June 19 at 11 a.m. Pacific), ISYS will be participating in a panel discussion at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.  The panel is part of Gilbane’s Enterprise Search and Text Analytics track, with the topic focused on what’s new and hot in search.  The panel will be moderated by Gilbane’s lead analyst for search, Lynda Moulton, who is constantly battling Steve Arnold for the title of “Most Prolific Enterprise Search Blogger” (although Steve, and possibly even Lynda, might object to the phrase “enterprise search”).  Both Lynda’s blog and Steve’s blog provide perhaps the best and most thorough collection of news and analysis of what’s happening in search, so be sure to check them out.

A brief description of the session can be found on the Gilbane San Francisco website.  For ISYS’ part, we’ll be discussing some of the new capabilities you’ll find in our new upcoming release.  This will be your chance to get the inside scoop on the technology before it’s released, so be sure to attend and say hello after the session.

We recently completed the survey for the upcoming 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery report.  It’s the third year we’ve responded, and if ISYS is any barometer for trends, then you’re left to conclude there’s actually something to this e-discovery thing.  Projections are up, the customer base is broader, and our technology (by design) is more directly engineered to answer many of the e-discovery challenges, including advanced search and text analytics. Pure e-discovery vendors would probably agree that the years ahead look good, but we’ll wait and see what Socha-Gelbmann say.

In Part One of our series on enterprise search white papers, we’d like to call your attention to our paper titled “Enterprise Search for E-Discovery Compliance.”  Over at DevCentral in Sydney, we’re busy doubling our capabilities in this space, but the paper itself serves as a good introductory overview on the key e-discovery requirements for search.  As always, we invite your comments.

As ISYS Search Software approaches its 20th birthday, its dutiful staff felt it was time to expand our communications into the ever-expanding world of corporate blogging.  And while individuals with greater knowledge on the subject could debate for days the merits of blogging, for ISYS it’s a logical extension of the types of customer and industry communications we’ve been doing for many years.

Longtime readers of our ISYS Update newsletter have been following along at home for quite some time now.  We evolved from a print edition to HTML email and now onto the weblog format.  Never fear loyal readers — our ever-popular riddle will make regular appearances in the blog, so we’ll continue to feed your brain-tease fix.

The focus of ISYS Enterprise Search Insights is to highlight the enterprise search industry’s hot topics and issues, tying them back to how ISYS and its customers see the world.  Various members of our staff will chime in from time to time, ensuring we capture and communicate multiple perspectives on the subject of search software.   We’ll also be tapping guest speakers, from customers and partners to industry insiders and observers.  You can rest assured we’re not looking to use this as a political vehicle; we’ll rely on the same plain-talk honesty we’ve become known for, with the overarching goal of highlighting key topics and stirring new ways of thinking about enterprise search.

To kick things off, we’ll be doing a multi-part series on various search topics with which we’re quite familiar.  Whenever possible, we’ll point to complementary content to help expand on the topic.  For this first series, we’ll be looking at our collection of enterprise search white papers, with topics ranging from e-discovery compliance to search analytics.  Please don’t hesitate to comment as we go along … the more comments, the better the discussion.