The phrase, ‘information is the lifeblood of an organization’ might be something of a cliche, but it is certainly true of business in the 21st century. The efficient delivery of products, goods and services is almost completely dependent upon accurate and timely information, and so as the repositories of organizations continue to swell with content and complexity, then the efficient and effective retrieval of useful and actionable information becomes a fundamental enterprise requirement.

Given that corporate information now resides within dozens of IT systems and is formatted in a myriad of file types, the task of ensuring that each and every employee can reliably and efficiently access information that is relevant and appropriate to their role is clearly a challenging one.

To make matters worse, around two thirds of this information will lack any form of structure or context. Unlike the web, where HTML documents are often linked and imbued with metadata, corporate documents seldom possess any kind of metadata or reference points. Moreover, even when documents are stored in electronic document and record management systems (EDRMs), the arbitrary filenames and directory paths employed by these systems offer few clues or hints as to the relationship that these documents have with one another.

Therefore, the challenge for enterprise search solutions is to find ‘meaning’ where there may be none, and to do this across traditional file shares, intranet sites, internet sites, EDRMs, enterprise applications, databases, email systems, and desktop hard drives. Add to this the requirement to support potentially hundreds or thousands of users across a variety of end-point architectures and devices, demands for open APIs, web services, and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and one can see why traditional enterprise search vendors, such as Convera, have had to re-architect their products, solutions, and business models.

Convera has been hard at work re-engineering its business and its product line for quite some time, and has launched its TrueKnowledge search platform in three distinct flavours:

1. TrueKnowledge for Web – a hosted service that provides a customized search engine for content publishers serving professionals and vertical-oriented markets.

2. TrueKnowledge for Discovery – a bundled hardware and software solution, which is deployed within the enterprise, and enables users to search documents held by the organization as well as on the web.

3. TrueKnowledge for Enterprise – a software-only enterprise search offering with the ability to incorporate selected web content in search results.

TrueKnowledge for Web has already got off to a flying start, with SearchMedica (a search engine for GPs), and govmine (a search engine for government employees) already up-and-running. Vertical search portals such as these are likely to increase in popularity over the coming months as end-users seek information that is both relevant to their role and to their industry.

Convera’s status with the enterprise search market remains high, thanks mainly to its mature technology, enviable customer base, and industry expertise. However, the financial performance of the company is less convincing, with Convera recently reporting that its quarterly revenues were down 58% when compared with the same quarter a year ago.

Convera executives appropriate the decline in company profitability to falling sales of its legacy RetrievalWare product line, and are keen to point out that it has already started to win deals with its TrueKnowledge platform.

Convera is currently in a period of transition as it changes from being a ‘product’ company to a ‘services’ company. This is a significant shift in emphasis, and is a huge undertaking for any company. Therefore, the key to Convera’s success going forward will undoubtedly revolve around its ability to transition RetrievalWare customers onto the new TrueKnowledge platform.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)