12 leading providers of cognitive search tools

12 leading providers of cognitive search tools

Attivo, Coveo, LucidWorks and Mindbreeze are among the leading providers of cognitive search tools, according to a new Wave report from Forrester Research.

AI and architecture are key differentiators

As legacy enterprise search technology becomes outdated and less effective, use of AI technologies such as natural language understanding will dictate which providers will lead the pack, according to Forrester Research. Vendors that can provide ingestion intelligence and intent intelligence position themselves to deliver the most relevant search results to their customers. In the new report, “The Forrester Wave: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019 The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up,” Forrester analysts Mike Gualtieri, Srividya Sridharan and Elizabeth HobermanIntro look at 12 of the leading providers.

Leaders

Six cognitive search tool providers were named as leaders in the report: Attivo, Coveo, IBM, Lucidworks, Mindbreeze and Sinequa.

Attivo

“Attivio’s cognitive search solution is comprehensive and customizable for the world’s most challenging use cases,” the report says. “The company accomplishes this by investing relentlessly in customization tools for both the data ingestion pipeline and tuning tools to augment its library of sophisticated NLU analytics.”

Coveo

“Relevancy is the cognitive grail of search,” the report stresses. “Coveo offers enterprise customers relevancy through a comprehensive portfolio of cognitive search products and industry solutions. Enterprises can take immediate advantage of Coveo’s cognitive search capabilities by using prebuilt applications, such as customer self-service, customer communities, in-product intelligence, and many more.”

IBM

“IBM’s approach to cognitive search is to bring its core search technology, Watson Discovery, together with its human-assisted training tool, Watson Knowledge Studio,” the report explains. “Knowledge Studio allows human experts to boost IBM’s exceptional NLU technology by providing them with tools to help the NLU understand specific business domains. IBM positions Watson Discovery as an AI-powered search engine that specializes in extracting answers from complex business documents. Customers can use Watson Assistant to add a conversational interface to any application.”

Lucidworks

“Lucidworks is the company behind Apache Solr, the well-known open source search platform,” the report says. “The company uses Solr as its solid open source foundation for its commercial Fusion product; Fusion turns Solr into a comprehensive enterprise cognitive search solution.”

Mindbreeze

“Mindbreeze InSpire is the only cognitive search solution in this evaluation that offers an appliance for on-premises and SaaS for cloud deployments,” according to the report. “The company has expanded dramatically since Google discontinued its Google Search Appliance (GSA); many customers migrated to Mindbreeze InSpire because the appliance form factor was what they were used to with GSA.”

Sinequa

“Sinequa’s goal is to help organizations become ‘information driven’ by augmenting the intelligence of every employee,” the report explains. “The company accomplishes this by surfacing knowledge, uncovering insights, and connecting experts via its cognitive search technology. Sinequa expertly balances using its own NLU technology in combination with the latest open source ML technology.”

Strong performers

Three cognitive search tool providers were named as strong performers in the report: Micro Focus, Microsoft and Squirro.

Micro Focus

“Micro Focus’ strengths are in data ingestion intelligence, relevancy intelligence, and tuning tools,” the report explains. “It also has a vast library of analytics for text, speech, and video that is second to none in the cognitive search market. Additionally, Micro Focus offers a prebuilt search application for virtual assistants and for what it calls ‘open source intelligence’ to uncover trends, patterns, and relationships from broadcasts, social media, websites, and virtually any openly available content from video, images, audio, and text data.”

Microsoft

“Microsoft has been steadily pumping out new AI/ML technologies that make information processing and retrieval faster and smarter,” the report states. “The company leverages that expertise to offer cognitive search directly in Office 365, and it offers Azure Search as a managed cloud service that app developers can use to embed cognitive search in custom applications.”

Squirro

“Squirro’s strategy is to use its core cognitive search solution for multiple prebuilt use cases spanning customer insights, service insights, and risk insights, and it is also available as an embedded Salesforce search service,” the report explains. “Additionally, the company offers industry-specific cognitive search solutions for banking, finance, insurance, and manufacturing.”

Contenders

Three cognitive search tool providers were named as contenders in the report: Elastic, Grazitti Interactive and IHS Markit.

Elastic

“Elastic App Search and Elastic Site Search are ideal for developers, including enterprise developers, who wish to quickly embed search in web or mobile applications,” the report says. “It includes client APIs for Ruby, Java, Python, Node.js, and JavaScript. These are offered as cloud-based services, so developers use them almost instantly by creating an online account. Once implemented, business users can use a management dashboard to tune relevancy.”

Grazitti Interactive

“Seeing a gap in its clients’ ability to easily find content from an increasing number of digital platforms, the company launched SearchUnify in 2016,” the report explains. “SearchUnify offers connectors for popular SaaS platforms including Box, Dynamics 365, GitHub, Jira, Lithium, Madcap Flare, Marketo, Salesforce, Slack, and Zendesk — for both cloud and on-prem data sources. Its virtual agent leverages search technology to answer conversational questions.”

IHS Markit

“IHS Markit’s primary business is to provide enterprises with intelligence across a wide set of capital-intensive industries,” the report says. “Goldfire, its cognitive search solution, manages enterprise data and gives customers out-of-the-box access to industry data through curated content, including patents, technical journals, and articles.”