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Comparing Autonomy and Microsoft FAST Search

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I was recently asked about the differences of Autonomy’s IDOL Search platform and FAST Search for SharePoint. The project to compare these two products turned out to be a challenge and it reminded me of a similar project that I did many years ago while I was working at an energy company. The energy company was about to form a software development team and I was asked to compare the Java and .Net development platforms.

What makes these projects tough is that when comparing platforms, you can’t simply compare features because the real value of the platform flows from the fact that it can be customized or tailored to satisfy unique requirements. This is what makes selecting a platform so difficult; vendors will tell you that their platform can do anything.

Both Microsoft and Autonomy get high marks from leading analyst firms like Gartner. In Gartner’s last Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search and Information Access published in 2009, Gartner gave Microsoft the edge by virtue of their ability to execute. This was a fair assessment in my view, given that back in 2006 Gartner didn’t even follow Microsoft because of their lack of a coherent search strategy. It seemed as each product team had their own search technology. This all changed in 2008 when Microsoft acquired top tier search vendor FAST Search and Transfer for 1.2 Billion Dollars.

Gartner Magic Quadrant

Analyst reports are helpful, but unless they are doing a report specifically for your organization they are generalizations. So it’s important to read the fine print. The majority of reports that I read were comparisons between search platforms being deployed for general use and overall productivity improvements. But increasingly, search is being deployed to solve specific business problems like e-Discovery, e-Commerce, Corporate Email Governance, etc.

I was asked to research both types of search: General productivity, which I’ll call Infrastructure Search, and the second, Search Applications. So without turning this post into a white paper what I found was that the differences in each search platform are a direct reflection of each company’s philosophy on search.

Autonomy provides a toolkit which can be heavily customized to satisfy very diverse requirements. Microsoft’s focus is on productizing complex features so they are easier to deploy and maintain.

So naturally Microsoft Search is better suited as Infrastructure Search because by design Microsoft worked to make it relatively easy to setup and maintain, and provide out of the box features that would have broad appeal across and organization.

When deploying Search Applications, the choice over which platform to choose is not as clear.  Autonomy’s focus is on flexibility So IDOL provides a toolkit that can be used to solve complex search problems.  Naturally higher complexity, makes it more difficult to setup and maintain resulting in a higher TCO. But to be fair, this can be justified in circumstances where search is core business.  Microsoft FAST has been successfully leveraged to build Search Applications particularly in the area of e-Commerce, so an organization must carefully assess the pros and cons of each platform depending on their goals to make the right choice.

The last thing I’d like to mention is I found it interesting that both Microsoft and Autonomy rely heavily on partners to deploy their software. But oddly enough I couldn’t find any ISV partners for Autonomy. Microsoft will often leave features and functionality to ISVs as a partner opportunity. As an example, Autonomy is known for the large number of search connectors that they have, whereas Microsoft has comparatively few. But Microsoft partners like BA Insight fill this gap by providing over 30 connectors to the most common ERP, CRM, ECM, and Messaging Apps. More on that here: http://www.bainsight.com/sharepoint-fast-search-connectors/Pages/default.aspx

To get more information, download this Autonomy and Microsoft Enterprise Search Product Comparison document.


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