IntraFind: empowering KM
Open source information access solutions are likely to exert considerable pressure on proprietary search vendors. In the last year or so, the "big name" vendors of proprietary search have been acquired by enterprise software companies eager to build their customer lists, engineering services revenue and footprint in the information retrieval market. In some cases, the prices paid for proprietary search vendors like Autonomy (now an HP company) have been notable due to the amount of money involved. Autonomy fetched about $10 billion for a company with revenues of about $800 million. HP now faces an Olympic-scale hurdle of generating sufficient revenue to earn back the $10 billion and make Autonomy grow larger. In fact, Dassault Systèmes, IBM, Lexmark and Oracle face a similar problem. Their proprietary search acquisitions have to generate sufficient cash to keep those systems competitive with open source alternatives like IntraFind.
Forecasting the future
What is the future of open source search? The savvy organization will tap open source search solutions for new projects or for applications where proprietary system costs are rising and difficult to control. In the organizations with which I am familiar, knowledge management, customer support and business intelligence are three business functions where open source search solutions make business sense.
Open source search, however, is just one type of enterprise software. Although search is a versatile and necessary function, open source solutions are available for data management tasks unsuited to proprietary data management systems like Oracle's database system or IBM's DB2. Open source software such as Cassandra and Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org) are enterprise-ready. For analytics, why embrace proprietary solutions from IBM SPSS or SAP when software from IKANOW or Jaspersoft is available under open source licenses?
What is important about IntraFind is that it is an example of an enterprise software vendor offering a stable, reliable open source solution. The problem for proprietary vendors boils down to a few key factors that include cost of ownership, freedom to modify the system to meet new requirements without licensing hassles or additional fees, and the continuous bug fixes and enhancements flowing from the open source community.
Proprietary enterprise software may be at an inflection point. Vendors of proprietary search systems may want to weigh Peter Drucker's words: "Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for ... Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality." (Source: quotationspage.com/quotes/Peter_Drucker.)
Open source search is poised to revolutionize some aspects of enterprise knowledge management. The change is coming at a propitious time.