What you need to know about The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search And Knowledge Discovery Solutions, Q2 2017

It has been about 18 months sense Forrester released it’s Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions. In general, Forrester reviewed the same companies. You can see a snapshot on a slideshare that we posted at MC+A here. Google’s out as is Lexmark. Replaced with Elastic and Squirro. Here are the big take aways from the update:

Keyword search is dead

With the ability to spin up elastic in a variety of on premise and cloud version, no one is looking to heavily invest in a commercial solution that simply provides keyword search. Pretty much everyone has begun to stop using the term “enterprise search”. With this I agree.

Cognitive Search is about: Understanding user’s intent and effecting outcomes. Last week I gave a webinar with Mark Floisand, Chief Marketing Officer of Coveo. We discussed this topic, the general shift towards insight engines. (If you goto the MC+A web site you can find the recording and slides)

The report is big on relevancy

Relevancy is key. But I don’t think the report does well to define how people are measuring it. Enterprise Search has moved beyond providing a list of results. These are now insight engines that power assist features, bots and many inline contextual experiences.

Defining what is relevant is not simply done based on a user providing a few keywords. It done looking at a variety of contextual data points sometimes without keywords.

The report establishes the general landscape

In general, companies who are considering a GSA re-platform or implementation of a cognitive solution can short list just the companies that are on this list. These are generally well run companies each with an interesting approach to solving the problems faced by end users. Each has strengths and philosophies that should become clear when you look briefly at their products.

The report incorrectly focuses on vague lost time as a key driver

In 2017, it’s surprising to see the general reference of abstracted wasted time by an employee as a key driver in purchasing. In general, I haven’t sold a search solution to an organization because they thought their workers were being interrupted a few times per month to look up information. The key driver for this technology is injecting it into specific processes and workflows which then benefit from the assisting function.

The scoring matrix seems odd

I like that Forrester provides it’s scoring matrix. It allows us to understand how each vendor did. I did notice some interesting categories and scoring. Some observations that I thought odd:

Market Presence weighted at Zero

The market presence seems to be weighted at Zero. I am not sure if that’s a typo or not. Market Presence is not as important as other categories but it should probably be greater than 0.

Implementation Support is under Strategy

Not sure why implementation support is under strategy. FWIW, MC+A implements many of these technologies.

Equal weighting of Current Offering to Strategy

No one should be making a purchase strictly on the application as it is. There is a significant investment and return to this technology. I don’t think that these therefore are equal weighted. I think an additional category or entry should be in the effectiveness of the products AI out of the box.

Questions? Drop a comment or send me a note at MC+A. We’d be happy to discuss your use case.