I have the best job in town. I get to work with smaller software companies that are delivering unique innovation and value. They sometimes introduce a sort of conflict, too. These nimble companies often showcase Microsoft technology more quickly and better than larger, more established firms, but they also show how much better the products from established companies (including Microsoft) could -- or should -- be.
Coveo is a case in point. Coveo does a far better job of enterprise search than the big guys: Verity, Google and Microsoft. In addition, Coveo provides a special focus on Sharepoint, which is quickly becoming the de facto document store in enterprises. Coveo is a part of Microsoft's private beta program for Office 12, so they'll likely retain and even improve that lead.
Don Dodge and I spoke recently with Eric Negler, Coveo's EVP of Sales, and Dan Bauhaus, their Director of Technical Sales. They took us through the product and emphasised these points:
Some aspects of search are universal: users typically enter ony a word or two, they seldom use sophisticated search terms (even quotation marks), and they rarely click deeper than the first three results (so relevance is king).
Enterprise search is not the same as web search.
Hyperlinks are less-used (and so are less valuable in ranking -- which largely defeats Google's value proposition)
Data sources and types are more diverse (they include databases, metadata or properites such as authoor and date, ERPsystems, and even video) and ranked results must weight accurately results from all these sources
Crawling and indexing techniques need to take account of corporate network management (for example, Google's crawling is often seen by corporate networks as a denial of service attack).
Search must respect the complex security, rights and policies that surround enterprise documents and stores.
Coveo's support for Sharepoint was particularly impressive. I loved the feature that summarized a document, and extracted key concepts from it.
Coveo has a stellar customer list, including the CIA, Fannie Mae, the US Air Force, and Credit Lyonnais Suisse. A few days after my chat with Eric and Dan, I spoke to Steve Jackson at PRTM, a 500-person consulting firm in Europe, US and Asia, who are major users of Coveo. Steve talked about their search requirements, and some limitations in Microsoft's search capability, that led PRTM to select Coveo. He made a couple of points that struck me:
The first class nature of Coveo's support. Steve said "they are responsive, and they take ownership of the problem from beginning to end."
Coveo's product " ... just feels right to me ... whoever designed it really knew what they were doing ... like the iPod."
Nice. If I'm going to recommend a company and a product to a Microsoft customer (and I absolutely will recommend Coveo), these are great attributes.
I may not mention the iPod though.
Mauro Cardarelli endorses Coveo in his blog ....
http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2005/12/03/8700.aspx
Posted by: cliffreeves | 05 December 2005 at 09:59 AM