Top 10 Reasons to Replace Enterprise Search with Unified Information Access Part 1

Thursday, August 12, 2010 - www.eBizQ.net

The method for finding information on the Web has become such a standard that we have turned a company name into a verb. Googling is great for finding the address for a specialist you've been referred to or perhaps pizza restaurants in west Boulder, Colorado (searching "pizza west boulder," I got 503,000 results in .35 seconds, the first of which was about something called Pizza Boulders in the Dona Ana Mountains, but 6 of the first 10 were pizza places in Boulder and the other 3 were pizza parlors on the Boulder Highway in Las Vegas. So, sure, the results were good enough.). But the truth is that this level of results doesn't satisfy business demands for intelligence that is exact, contextual and complete - and that is either processed and produced on demand or delivered automatically. Like Googling, enterprise search engines just search content and can't access or synthesize the data that business people need to make decisions, detect risks and explore possibilities. What's more, search returns a list, which, while better than nothing, still requires you to dig and then manually combine with relevant data and other documents.

Enterprise search engines have now been around long enough that business users have become disillusioned and are demanding better capabilities for getting important information. In response, new technologies have been introduced, and the vendor landscape has been shifting. Acquisitions, redirected strategies and discontinued products have altered the market, but the most significant development is the emergence of a new class of technology: unified information access (UIA), which delivers complete information - regardless of type or source - by combining capabilities from search, business intelligence and text analytics.

This article details the top 10 reasons enterprises and government agencies worldwide are replacing their legacy search technology with UIA to expand their information access capabilities.

Click here to read the full article!