Oracle 's purchase of Endeca is not surprising, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst with the Real Story Group. Autonomy, which is Endeca's biggest rival, was in talks with Oracle before Hewlett-Packard acquired Autonomy , Pelz-Sharpe wrote, in a blog post.

"Though financial details have not been disclosed, it is safe to assume that Oracle paid far less than the $10 billion-plus that HP spent on Autonomy," he said. The Endeca acquisition fits neatly with Oracle's growing interest in the online retail space, Pelz-Sharpe noted.

"Endeca has carved out quite a niche in providing unstructured data analytics in the retail sector, with decent -- albeit broadly mimicked -- guided navigation capabilities," he said. "Additionally Endeca has a pretty good reputation for customer service and for investing in ongoing research and development, in sharp contrast to Autonomy."

Oracle's purchase of Endeca is not surprising, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst with the Real Story Group. Autonomy, which is Endeca's biggest rival, was in talks with Oracle before Hewlett-Packard acquired Autonomy, Pelz-Sharpe wrote in a blog post.

"Though financial details have not been disclosed, it is safe to assume that Oracle paid far less than the $10 billion-plus that HP spent on Autonomy," he said. The Endeca acquisition fits neatly with Oracle's growing interest in the online retail space, Pelz-Sharpe noted.

"Endeca has carved out quite a niche in providing unstructured data analytics in the retail sector, with decent -- albeit broadly mimicked -- guided navigation capabilities," he said. "Additionally, Endeca has a pretty good reputation for customer service and for investing in ongoing research and development, in sharp contrast to Autonomy." 

We've heard cries that the enterprise search market is dead, that thefight is over and that it is now a two-horse race between Microsoft and Google. There may be some truth in this, but it's certainly not the whole story. The enterprise search market continues to move forward, albeit with a few major challenges. The downside is that these challenges can make what seems like a simple search product selection and implementation project for the enterprise more complex and costly than expected.

As of mid-2011, the search market is dominated by three big names, Google, Microsoft and Apache Lucene. The Google appliance continues to sell well at the departmental level within organizations. Microsoft, via its dominance with Office and SharePoint, has become the de facto search application for many back-office needs. And Lucene has become ubiquitous as an embedded search engine in many products and applications. With these three very different dominant search engines in the market, it can be hard to make a mark as an independent search vendor today.

We could add a fourth name to list in the form of Autonomy, the U.K. tech giant currently being acquired by HP. Though they remain a formidable force, Autonomy has lately been known for acquiring myriad companies and products linked together via the IDOL platform, and not a major enterprise search vendor.

Box.net held its first Boxworks user conference this week. It was like a coming out party for the growing cloud computing company. They made a splash by giving away a Motorola Xoom to every attendant, but the real news was a new cash infusion by Salesforce.com and a deal with Salesforce to integrate Box content in Salesforce Chatter.

Unfortunately details about the funding were scarce and Ashley Mayer, Box spokesperson, said they weren't really prepared at this time to provide any additional information on the amount or timing of the funding.

As for the integration with Salesforce Chatter, this is a big step as Box teams up with one of the giants of cloud computing around enterprise social computing. Chatter will be able to access Box content from within the Salesforce application.

Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe, of Real Story Group, says these and other announced enhancements make a lot of sense. "Announcements beefing up security (cloud's key perceived weakness) and adding more and more collaboration functions are to be expected," he said.

He added, "Most SharePoint deployments are about basic file sharing, storage and collaboration rather than hard core ECM (aka process management) so why not promote the likes of Box as low cost but very functional alternatives you can integrate with? SharePoint is a threat or at the least a perceived threat to big ECM/Data Management players, Box is not."

At least not yet anyway. If Box keeps growing as it has been, it might become a threat sooner than these companies expect.

In looking at the fragmentation of SharePoint in large organizations, a leading enterprise content management analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe discovered that “…enterprises can in fact reach a point of negative returns where an inability to manage proliferating SharePoint silos becomes a hidden but serious enterprise management risk.”

Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the opposite of a standard network effect with their information and people. In these sprawled and firewalled environments, an increase in users and data make it more difficult to locate content, make decisions, and gain insights from past actions.  This means more information is creating more complexity – far from the ideal outcome if organizations are about to generate orders of magnitude more information.

We've heard cries that the enterprise search market is dead, that thefight is over and that it is now a two-horse race between Microsoft and Google. There may be some truth in this, but it's certainly not the whole story. The enterprise search market continues to move forward, albeit with a few major challenges. The downside is that these challenges can make what seems like a simple search product selection and implementation project for the enterprise more complex and costly than expected.

As of mid-2011, the search market is dominated by three big names, Google, Microsoft and Apache Lucene. The Google appliance continues to sell well at the departmental level within organizations. Microsoft, via its dominance with Office and SharePoint, has become the de facto search application for many back-office needs. And Lucene has become ubiquitous as an embedded search engine in many products and applications. With these three very different dominant search engines in the market, it can be hard to make a mark as an independent search vendor today.

It's not every day that a company plunks down $10 billion and the news becomes a sidebar. But that's what happened last week when Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire Autonomy for that amount.

The deal was overshadowed by the news that HP is weighing the sale or spinoff of its PC business, that it was shutting down its webOS hardware business and that it was lowering its revenue outlook for the year. All of that, and questions about the merits of its Autonomy acquisition, led to analyst downgrades and a 20 percent drop in HP's share price Friday (it recovered a bit Monday, gaining 3.6 percent)...

HP noted that Autonomy's revenue growth was running at a compounded annual growth rate of 55 percent. Its 25,000 customers include major corporations, law firms and federal agencies such as AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Ericsson, FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestlé, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

It also has 400 OEM partners including Symantec, Citrix, HP, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO...

"Buyers of its technology though have been less enthusiastic, regularly citing a firm that is arrogant in its dealings with customers, confused roadmap messages, and technology (particularly the core IDOL platform) that is overly complex and expensive to use," wrote Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal with The Real Story Group. "On the other side of the equation is HP, a hardware and services firm that has had very little success with software."

Irina Guseva, an analyst at Real Story Group said the deal was a surprise on a number of levels, especially given the hefty price tag.

"The first shocker is the $10B sticker price, which looks to be hugely overpriced," she said. She added that it was especially curious given HP's historical emphasis on hardware and infrastructure, rather than software and services.

But RSG's Guseva saw this as more of a content management play, "For HP, this acquisition is a competitive ECM/WCM nod in IBM and Oracle's direction. Note how the spin-off of the PC business mimics that of IBM. Autonomy's powerhouse of technology lends some interesting potential opportunities though, as long as the direction doesn't revolve entirely around IDOLization," she said.

Whatever the reason, and however HP chooses to use Autonomy's assets, this deal signals yet more consolidation in the content management space, and fewer independent vendor choices for content management consumers moving forward. 

For now, HP has made a clear bet on software and services, and away from hardware. How that plays out in the future is anyone's guess, but it is clearly a monumental shift for HP--one that could have a big impact on content management and HP's growing role in the space.

Analysts reacting to the sudden and steep drop in Open Text's (NASDAQ: OTEX) stock price last week were unconcerned about it, attributing it more to the volatile worldwide stock market than anything fundamental about Open Text's viability.

When news broke last Thursday that Open Text failed to meet its expected quarterly profit target, The Financial Post reported that Open Text stock prices plunged as much as 16 percent in early trading.

Analyst Alan-Pelz Sharpe from Real Story Group agreed. "I am not a financial analyst but I don't see anything to worry about in terms of Open Text stock price, as stock prices around the world have fallen similarly in the last few weeks," he said.

Beyond static document imaging, scanning and capture lies the realm of automating systems and processes for the best use of information and more efficient business practices. By standardizing the processing of forms such as invoices, for example, an organization can automate the sending of reminders about late payments, making it more efficient in completing mundane tasks that help improve the bottom line.

Although the truly paperless office might remain a myth, modernizing systems to read invoices, bills of lading and even resumes through the use of document imaging software and scanning equipment can move a company closer to that ideal.

But getting there can present certain challenges. “This is not install once and walk away,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst and director at consulting firm Real Story Group in Olney, Md. “First, [you need to] ensure that you have the technical skills to configure and maintain a powerful capture system.” Then, he said, it’s critical to introduce procedures and policies defining standard practices so they become the rule.

Once an enterprise has its new document imaging software and scanning equipment up and running, it’s business as usual, right? Wrong. The only way to maintain the investment of time and money in the imaging and scanning system is by constantly revisiting it.

But few organizations continue to benchmark the performance of their document imaging systems or fine-tune them after the go-live date, and that can be costly, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst and director at Real Story Group, a content management consulting firm based in Olney, Md.

Joomla is not the first open-source WCM system to separate out its core functionality for re-use in other endeavors. Developers behind the Joomla competitor Drupal also re-architectured their software to fit this model.

"On the plus side, you have the freedom to develop custom applications off the Joomla Platform, leveraging core services like security, database handling, logging, without having to use or getting tied down by the restriction of CMS layer," explained Sanjeev Gupta, an analyst with the Real Story Group, in a blog post on the release. "On the down side, it means two different (albeit related) environments for the all-important Joomla add-ons ... to address. This could complicate compatibility going forward."

Despite years of effort and substantial investments in technology and training, most companies still have relatively immature practices for governing the structured data stored in corporate databases and data warehouses, according to industry analysts. But when you consider the burgeoning data stores of unstructured content throughout the typical enterprise – containing everything from emails to documents to files stored in SharePoint collaborative workspaces – the discipline of information governance isn’t just immature. It can be downright chaotic.

“When it comes to broader information, particularly unstructured data – in the real world, we’re talking about mountains of stuff in shared drives, on hard disks, on floppy disks, even in paper [files]. It’s just a complete mess,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst at Real Story Group, an Olney, Md.-based consulting firm that focuses on content management technologies. “There’s a need to bring some sort of order to the chaos, but the kind of governance practices and structures that work for data warehouses simply don’t work outside of that paradigm.”

Pelz-Sharpe noted that while data governance programs focused on structured data often include automated controls driven by applications, there is no such correlation for information governance efforts, which typically depend on business users to ensure that unstructured data meets corporate guidelines for validity and accessibility by others. 

Further refining an already widely used full-text search engine, the Apache Software Foundation has updated Lucene to execute searches more quickly across multiple servers, the development team announced Friday. It has also improved performance of Lucene's accompanying search platform, Solr.

While not a radical upgrade, the new 3.3 versions of Solr and Lucene do include numerous improvements, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst and director of the content-management-system analysis firm Real Story Group, which tracks the progress of these technologies.

Created by Doug Cutting, who also originated Hadoop, Lucene is a Java full-text distributed search engine, one aimed to run speedily across multiple platforms and across multiple servers. Solr provides the interface from which searches can be issued and results presented back to the user.

Lucene and Solr are widely used as the basis for Intranet and internal enterprise search engines, where they can be used to index and retrieve word documents, PDFs, databases, geospatial content and other forms of rich media content. Enterprise software system providers such as IBM bundle Lucene in their own offerings, Pelz-Sharpe said.

Lucene is a "mature and well-proven" text engine, Pelz-Sharpe said. Because it is open source, organizations can fine-tune how the technology works, though its use does require a fair amount of on-hand expertise, he warned.

The physical part of document capture -- scanning -- is essentially a “dumb” process that simply preserves corporate documents in accessible electronic files. Increasingly, however, new capabilities in document capture software are making it possible to use the tools to streamline and optimize the overall document management process, according to analysts...

“This is a very vibrant time for capture, and I think it has crossed a chasm in terms of its application,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst and director at Olney, Md.-based consulting firm Real Story Group. Although document imaging and document capture technologies have been around as long as there have been scanning tools, their speed and accuracy have reached new levels, Pelz-Sharpe added. “At the high end, if used properly, they can be more accurate than humans, and that is an obvious breakthrough,” he said.

As an example of the degree to which document capture results have improved, Pelz-Sharpe cited a client that only a few years ago employed about 40 people to verify and correct scan problems on document images. Today, that head count has been reduced to two because of better software. “It isn’t so much the scanners themselves, though they have continued to improve,” he said. “It’s the software, which now often incorporates artificial intelligence.”

According to Apoorv Durga, a web content management expert at IT analyst company Real Story Group, the acquisition can be seen as an admission by Oracle that its existing solution is not up to scratch.

"In my view, Oracle finally realised that its own web publishing offering was just not good enough compared to many other offerings in the market, and there was just no point in investing resources in that," he said today. "Customers need more agility and flexibility than they could offer and so they certainly had this gap to plug."

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst and director at Olney, Md.-based consulting firm Real Story Group, said another potential pitfall is a lack of patience when implementing sophisticated document capture technologies – tools with embedded artificial intelligence capabilities, for example.

According to Pelz-Sharpe, it’s all too common for companies that have invested in advanced document capture software to want to simply “flip the switch” and go live. But that can lead to user dissatisfaction and data errors, he said.

One client that deployed new document capture tools for use in processing patent-application documents “found it took six to nine months for the system to ‘learn’ and become highly accurate,” Pelz-Sharpe said, adding that even relatively simple capture processes “will require a few days” for the tools to acclimate themselves. As a result, he advised, it’s a good idea to continue running existing document capture software in parallel with new tools until you’re sure that the latter are working properly.

Theresa Regli, principal at The Real Story Group, spoke here at the Henry Stewart DAM event in New York, providing her in-depth insight to help companies get more out of their Digital Asset Management (DAM) initiatives. Her speech was engaging and enlightening, and provided a thorough analysis regarding the current challenges implementing an enterprise DAM strategy.
Regli does not believe it wise to jump into bed too quickly with DAM vendor. First give it thoughtful consideration, she cautions. Theresa strongly encourages strategic review — especially of your internal and external mobile strategies — prior to any official product intimacy.

"New channels are changing the technology and direction of DAM," Regli said. She continued, "We are here to engage people." According to Regli, DAM should deliver the right media to the right device at the right time. While that device may not always be an iPad, a DAM solution should be flexible enough to provide a fantastic user experience no matter what device the user is wielding.

"Strata" is Regli's new favorite word, she repeated this several times throughout her speech. By that, she means that there are different components to a successful DAM solution. A successful strategy brings together both the human and technical concerns.

The category of middleware originally dubbed "content management systems" has been evolving and ramifying at a furious pace. The term has been applied to everything from WordPress on the low end all the way up to IBM's and Oracle's enterprise management systems. (The Real Story Group publishes a breakdown of CMS vendors at five categories of scale.)

A new e-book from Fierce Content Management looks at a current trends within the sub-category of Web-facing CMS systems called WCM, or Web content management. An important trend is the incorporation of features required by marketing, and the selling of these WCM systems to marketing departments as opposed to the IT departments that have traditionally been the targets.

E-book author Ron Miller writes that the phenomenon of WCM salespeople calling on the marketing department is a relatively new one. Over time, more features geared to marketing's needs are being added to these systems...

For detailed reviews and feature comparisons across the entire CMS space, the paid services of the Real Story Group, which is vendor-independent, could stand you in good stead as well.

Lucid Imagination came up with a great idea a few years ago to create a product around the Apache Lucene/Solr open source search engine. The open source tool had a lot of fans, but it lacked a corporate sponsor that many enterprises require. That was the so-called "throat to choke" should anything go wrong. Despite the fact that Lucene/Solr had been around for years nobody had ever monetized it in this way.

This new version takes advantage of an open source connector created by none other than Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). According to a blog post by Real Story Group's Adriaan Bloem, who writes:

"...More interestingly, perhaps, is that this also means it's not too hard to use Google's Framework to feed SharePoint content to Solr, instead. And this is exactly what Lucid Imagination has done in their latest 1.7 release of the LucidWorks distribution. Using the connector, it's now as easy to index SharePoint with Solr as it is with a Google Appliance."

As Bloem points out though just because it uses open source parts doesn't mean it's free. If you want a throat to choke, you have to pay the piper and Lucid Imagination charges real money for this product.