Lynda Moulton, over at the Gilbane Group, posted an interesting blog post on how Enterprise Search vendors don't really get the complexities of the customer engagements for which they are offering solutions. She seems frustrated by the difficulties in getting these 'wonderful' enterprise search products working. And is missing out on good documentation, service, and training. She identifies the poor service as a weakness in the vendors and I agree with her whole heartedly. However, I think it is important to outline the reasons why us vendors are like that.
1) Search vendors sell a product - It's a shrink wrapped, 'deliver with a installation wizard and go' solution which is just supposed to work on every customer's environment no matter how complex.
2) Those who purchase enterprise search tools expect to be able to have their IT admin set up and maintain this tool
3) Google sets the bar. It's built for the IT admin and gives 'good enough' results so customers expect to get that from a way more complicated tool and for the same price. And vendors know that's what they are competing against.
4) Customers drive the development, packaging and service level - you can't force customers to care about good documentation, good service, and good training. If you could, everyone would use MondoSearch. Customers compare products based on feature checklists.
5) Many vendors and customers depend on System Integrator partners to do the services part so can only hope that they have the skills to do the job and the desire to give good service.
6) Analysts promote products that can do very technical things (like index hundreds of document types) and those who can pay them a lot to do analysis.
She recommends "Frank discussions with customers that set expectations about deployment and implementation, potential bottlenecks, and the need for experienced searchers, search analysts and subject matter experts on the team with the IT group". This is all fine and dandy but from my experience, when we start to discuss these things with customers they get concerned. We have been selling search analysis tools for about 6 years now and when customers hear that they might have to spend 20 minutes a week monitoring the search engine for performance they get very worried looks on their faces. Software is supposed to make your job easier, not harder! This is why, I believe, Endeca is making headway in the market - guided navigation is easy, automatic, and promises to solve all your search woes.
So Lynda should not feel too bad. I know its frustrating to deal with vendors but not all vendors are the same and she certainly hasn't tried us all. And partially, analysts are to blame for the way vendors are seen and motivated in the marketplace.