It’s been quite a while since we published a round-up of funding and M&A in the sector, but that’s not to say nothing has happened.
Enterprise Search
This week we published our Enterprise Search and KM Market Forecast. It’s a niche market, though at $2.6B, not insignificant, and there has been little analyst coverage over recent years.
Unlike the past two years’ flurry of game-changing product announcements such as Box Sign, Box Shield, Box Governance, and Box Shuttle, Box Works 2022 was short on “new” and long on “we’re now in GA with all the stuff we said we would do”. This will be good news for Box’s enterprise license customers who seem eager to deploy the new tools.
Our website recently published five new vendor-specific reports (Vendor Vignettes in Deep Analysis parlance). And we have many more in the works that we plan to publish in late September.
If you want evidence of where things are going, French search giant Sinequa this week announced the launch of not one but four pre-trained deep learning language models for its platform. Four, not one – that is a vast amount of AI processing power.
Specialized MSPs may be the answer, and to be clear, some, though not that many, already exist (particularly for Elasticsearch), but not many. And as advanced AI (think neural networks and Deep Learning) start to play a more significant role in these applications, one would hope more will become available.
The Trump Organization has retained HaystackID to use its tools to trawl through its communications and files to meet the requirements of legal disputes running in New York. This week, Judge Arthur Engoren demanded more transparency and urgency from HaystackID.
Last week Dropbox to little fanfare announced that they had acquired San Francisco-based desktop search firm Command E.
But one area that seems to have garnered little attention is the gritty reality of the challenge of finding information, gaining and sharing knowledge, and make informed decisions. Endless Zoom meeting, just don’t cut it. We get by, we do the best we can, but for knowledge workers, in particular, there are serious and often unacknowledged challenges ahead.