See also Google vs. Autonomy vs. Sharepoint forthcoming teleconference June 18, 2008

What do you do when your enterprise search vendor gets acquired by another company? Do you stick with the existing vendor in the face of an uncertain future for long-term support? Do you migrate to the new vendor product, or do you re-evaluate all the available enterprise search options?

In the face of technical change and market consolidation, many of our members who are Verity customers are choosing the third path. When they do, the final choice often boils down to two options: Autonomy and Google.

In this article we summarize a recent Proof of Concept (POC) conducted by a US-based global maker of high technology components used in manufacturing and building technologies. Most of the material was contributed by Jim Smith, who participated in the POC.

Background
The company is a Fortune 100 firm with three distinctly different businesses that serve customers in 125 countries. Over 60,000 of its employees are knowledge workers. The ability to discover new technologies, processes, and business intelligence across regions, languages, and business units is key to the company's performance. Since 1996, the company had been using the Verity search engine and since 2002 had integrated it into its enterprise portal network. When Verity was acquired, it began evaluating how Autonomy would support the Verity K2 platform. With a desire to stay current, they decided to look at the entire field of enterprise search vendors rather than simply migrate to the Autonomy IDOL platform (1). After evaluating the responses to their Request for Quotation, they selected Autonomy and Google for a week-long Proof of Concept (POC) test. The goal was to verify that their desired core functionality would work and to identify key issues.

Autonomy was a logical choice, but why Google?

More ... (members only) How to become a member

Created on April 18, 2008 l Updated on April 30, 2008