I had a terrific time at the Enterprise Search Summit 2010 in New York City last week. Much like last year it was filled with interesting people and ideas - but there was a hint of change in the air as well.

The change started with David White of Aberdeen group, who presented results from a recent survey of Enterprise Search implementations. Using the reported benefits, Dave was able to identify the characteristics of the "best in class" efforts which on average yielded ~6 hours of additional employee productivity. (Less effective implementations gained only 1 hour.) The main drivers of success were a total focus on employee productivity, proper staffing, and providing access to as many critical sources of information as possible. Less effective efforts were driven by desires to control costs, or single-source implementations.

The next day, Sue Feldman of IDC led a panel discussion that included extensive discussion about how to best implement information access. A key point made was that users want a single point of access to all information. This is often difficult to deliver with legacy platforms because of the "reality" of breaking content and data out of their silos, the differences between technologies used in each silo, and the more severe issue of trying to maintain security. These are the very reasons Attivio exists, and it was great to hear three executives from different types of firms talk about how concrete these barriers are. There were also many notes about search and BI starting to blur together, as people need "search to get at content" like user perspective on products/services, but they want that in a regular delivery mechanism - a report.

Finally, Leslie Owens of Forrester closed the conference with a look at the future of search. Her opening line was that the "broad category of enterprise search is dead". How's that for change at an Enterprise Search conference? She also noted that the first wave of enterprise search platforms were not easy to use. Critically, she then went on to explain that what users want are applications or solutions that address a specific problem or requirement, and that may offer a range of information access as appropriate to the end user's goal. That might include search, BI, reporting, dashboards, collaboration, social intelligence, content management, workflow, etc. Leslie noted that a critical enabler of such applications is the underlying platform, which, in her penultimate slide entitled "Unified Information Access (UIA)" she defined visually as:

Attivio was founded around the core idea of UIA as the next-generation of information access. It is great to see the momentum this idea has gained in the market!

Speaking of UIA, I was delighted to present more detail on it during my presentation entitled
"Search, Relevancy and Performance: Keeping up with Massive Query Volumes and Minimizing Latency". I opened with a discussion and specific examples of how breaking down silos continues to be a leading barrier to maximizing productivity within the enterprise.

Lasse Hamre, EVP of Technology at Thumbplay then presented Thumbplay Music, a fantastic new streaming service powered by Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE). Thumbplay music can turn your Blackberry into a music center with unparalleled capabilities including iTunes integration and offline playback. (Android phones are also supported, and iPhone support is imminent.) Attivio has been working with Thumbplay for more than two years now, having first provided search for their mobile content aggregation platform (in use today by more than 8,000 partners!). I was delighted to hear Lasse say that the support Thumbplay gets from Attivio is the best he's ever received. We also showed off a variety of cool features, from popularity-based relevancy in mobile content to sophisticated typeahead support that will be rolled out early next week, and played a few tunes at what was otherwise a fairly text-oriented show.

Here are my slides from the presentation:

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