Pattern Finder

SharePoint: It's Off to a Fast Mental Start

The analysts in the CCS service discuss/debate a lot of things among ourselves. A common topic is how quickly a technology will be adopted -- SharePoint 2007 being the latest example. While we all recognize that 2007 is not going to be the year of its wholesale adoption (based on past history), I must admit I was surprised at the intensity of interest in SharePoint 2007 at today's TeleBriefing.

Karen Hobert and I gave a TeleBriefing today on the subject of Office/SharePoint 2007 in terms of both ECM and web content management. The enrollment was comparatively high, which I was expecting based on the number of questions I get about SharePoint from clients. But what caught me off guard was the specificity of the questions at the end.

The Two Vendor Camps: Happy Talk and Reality Check

In my previous post, I talked about the penchant many vendors have for launching into "happy talk" mode when talking to analysts. This isn't totally true -- some vendors are actually straightforward when they meet with analysts -- but that's a minority.

In my eight years of being an analyst, I've found that vendors fall into one of two categories: (1) Happy Talkers or (2) Reality Checkers.

The Happy Talkers are the ones who view speaking with an analyst as a marketing moment: "If we can convince this analyst that everything is swell ('Don't mention last month's layoffs') and that customers are banging down the door to buy our product ('Come on, rack your brain to think of another logo we can add to customer logos slide'), then they'll recommend the product to their clients and we'll make more sales." Along these lines, I have known vendors who have laid off 10% of their workforce the previous  month and then do not mention it in their slides or when I give them an opportunity to fess up by asking them, "Things going well? Any bumps in the road?" They leave the briefing thinking they've pulled the wool over my eyes; I leave the briefing knowing they are liars -- or at the very least stretch the truth -- and aren't to be trusted.

Open Text: Adjusting to the New Order

At its IT Analyst Day, Open Text did a lot of straight talking -- to its credit. Tom Jenkins' first slide said:

• SharePoint has changed the ECM market.
• The "old" ECM market now becomes the ECM applications market.
• The ECM BCS infrastructure market becomes part of the platform.
• All the original vendors will migrate into one or the other slot.
• The main platform players will be IBM, ORCL and MSFT.

I was sitting there thinking, "Whoa," and "Jeez, I couldn't have said it better myself."

The reason this was a "Whoa" moment is that most vendors go into "happy talk" mode when talking to analysts -- minimizing their difficulties and hyping their successes. In contrast, Open Text took the opportunity to admit that the ECM market is changing in fundamental ways, and described how they're reacting to the changes.

Off to Open Text Analyst Day

Well, I'm off to a day (10-4) of briefings by Open Text. This type of event is often put on by the larger software vendors to give IT industry analysts an overview of the state of the company and its products.

This analyst day is in Boston. It was originally scheduled for some warm clime (Arizona, California), but given the travel time (one day out, one briefing day, one day back) I'm sure most of the analysts balked at attending. Since the analyst center of the universe is the East Coast (Boston/New York), this makes a lot more sense.

I've now been covering Open Text, an enterprise content management vendor, for seven years. You'd think what their products do would stick most in my mind. But frankly, what I most remember about Open Text is an episode a number of years ago. A large Open Text crew turned up to give me a briefing when I worked at Aberdeen Group. The CEO at the time, Tom Jenkins (now Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman), started off by introducing the other Open Text employees, and then opened up his laptop and spent the rest of the meeting answering e-mails while the others talked. Not quite sure how much he got out of the briefing...

New Version of the Google Search Appliance

Google announced new features to its Google Search Appliance today. These include:

• Clustered Results -- The grouping of results into categories to help users find what they want even if they use ambiguous terms -- e.g., a query for "apple" within a company that does food distribution may turn up results about the fruit as well as about Apple Computer. While new to the Search Appliance, this capability is not new to search solutions. Northern Light and Vivisimo have been pitching this user interface capability for a number of years.
• Source Biasing -- Google's term, but sometimes discussed within the larger context of results ranking. This feature allows administrators to assign weights to search results (thereby altering results rank) based on the source or type of content. For example, a company may generate its draft documents in Microsoft Word and then publish the final version in PDF. Therefore, giving PDF a higher weight would ensure that the final version of the document ranks higher in the results list than the draft versions. This is Google's first admission that you need to have knobs on the Appliance to tune search results. It will be interesting to see how many knobs get added in future releases, given Google's penchant for "don't futz with it."
• Connectors to SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 -- Given the well-known competition between Google and Microsoft, the press will probably have a field day with this one. But when Google pre-briefed me on this announcement in December, they admitted, "Look -- a lot of companies have portions of their content sitting in SharePoint. If we want to offer a useful appliance for corporations we have to admit that fact." To me, that's a healthy understanding of reality.

While the enterprise search incumbents continue to pooh-pooh Google's search appliance (e.g., "It's useful and cheap, but you can't do really sophisticated things with it."), the fact of the matter is that Google's installed base of Search Appliances probably outnumbers the installed bases of the major vendors  added together.

It's akin to Pierce Arrow pooh-poohing the Model T back in the 1920s. There's a need for both -- but don't underestimate the vendor that brings a new technology to the masses.