Sue Aldrich's Research

Best Practices for Web Experience Management

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Web experience management involves strategy, plans, tactics, practices, and metrics for all customer digital interactions. Our three best practices will deliver better customer relationships and improved business results. In this article, we present not only the best practices but also nine guiding principles for successfully applying the three practices.

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Success with Best Practices for Targeted Merchandising

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendation technology has made targeted merchandising accessible to merchants of any size. We’ve identified three best practices for targeted merchandising, plus the eight principles that will guide you in applying the practices. Our best practices can be applied to your targeted merchandising whatever technology you are using: we bring you principles and tactics that are solid and time tested.

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Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 2

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendation solutions are hot among online marketers and customer service executives, Recommendation engines increase order size, improve search results and increase personalization. We identify the key criteria for selecting a recommendation solution. Use this framework as you evaluate recommendation solutions for your organization.

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Recommendation Solution Market Recap: 1Q2011

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The recommender systems market is in a growth phase, and the classic wave of market consolidation is still in the future. Based on company reported data, we recap product, customer, and company activity for recommender systems providers Adobe, Avail, Baynote, iGoDigital, Locayta, MyBuys, PredictiveIntent, and Strands.

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Five Reasons to Put Your Business in the Cloud

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

SaaS has democratized advanced capabilities that had been available only to top tier sites, signaling a revolution in how software is consumed. The biggest impact of SaaS for e-business will prove to be the democratization of capabilities that have until recently only been available to the very top tier ecommerce sites: great search and merchandising, with highly relevant offers, search results, and recommendations. Learn why SaaS is so hot, and prepare your checklist for finding the right SaaS for your company.

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Comparative Rating of Five Recommendations Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Marketers use Recommendation Engines to help customers select and buy their products. This relative ranking summarizes our detailed evaluation and comparison of five leading recommendation solutions: Avail Intelligence, Baynote, Certona, Omniture, and RichRelevance. Although the efficacy of recommendation algorithms may ultimately be the most important aspect of a solution, buying decisions are more often based on vendors’ geographic coverage, target markets, client care, industry expertise, scalability, and the interfaces provided to control recommendations.

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Recommendation Solution Evaluation Blank Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A decade ago merchants and publishers saw the recommendations on Amazon’s site and wanted it. A decade ago they had to spend a fortune to get it. Today, recommendation engines can be had for some hundreds of dollars a month, and implemented in a few days. My guess is that recommendations will be ubiquitous within the next 3-4 years. I’m always optimistic on these guesses, but since recommendations are widely available as a service, rollout can be very swift. SaaS offerings greatly simplify the technology aspect of implementation and virtually eliminate up front costs, making it relatively easy for customers to sign up with a vendor. Nevertheless, choosing a vendor wisely is always better than choosing often. To aid in that choice, I offer a set of requirements and evaluation criteria set forth in this evaluation framework. And I will be evaluating a number of the leading products using the framework during 2010, leading to a detailed comparison.

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Side-by-Side Comparison of Six Recommendations Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations, behavioral targeting, personalization: key tools for boosting customer engagement and streamlining interactions. We’ve analyzed six of the leading recommendations solutions, using our detailed evaluation framework. The research is synthesized and summarized in this Excel spreadsheet presenting a side-by-side comparison across criteria.

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Certona Resonance Recommendations

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. Certona Resonance Recommendations stacks up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in retail or B2B ecommerce, Certona should be on your short list. Resonance offers a high degree of automation for optimizing your site, and a console that gives you a high degree of control over those spots that you want to manage. Certona has exceeded all customer SLAs for the past year.

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Loomia Recommendations

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. Loomia’s recommendation solutions stack up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in media, entertainment, ecommerce, online services, or online research, Loomia should be on your short list. Loomia has a strong track record with big media clients such as Wall Street Journal and Thomson Reuters; and big ecommerce sites such as Travelocity and Audible. Key strengths are the breadth of its market; its high-profile client base; and the breadth of the recommendation types, goals, and metrics its solutions support.

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Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform and Recommendation Applications

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. Baynote’s family of recommendation solutions, based on its Collective Intelligence Platform, stack up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in retail or B2B ecommerce, publishing, telecommunications, travel, media, healthcare, high-tech, consumer packaged goods, or manufacturing, Baynote should be on your short list. Baynote has an impressive approach to tracking visitor engagement, and a suite of applications that includes social search, mobile, video, email, and SEM/SEO.

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Avail Intelligence Behavioral Merchandising

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. Avail Behavioral Merchandising, a recommendation solution from Avail Intelligence, stacks up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in retail or B2B ecommerce, Avail Behavioral Merchandising should be on your short list. Avail has an intimate model of client care, provides its technology both on-premise and SaaS, hosts its service with Amazon Web Services, and its recommendation algorithms include unique capability for merchant collaboration.

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Recommendation Engine Market Survey

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Our survey on the market for recommendation engines, developed in collaboration with the Institut Telecom of Paris, uncovered a few surprises. Foremost among them: B2B is a strong market, and almost half of respondents plan to deploy recommendations by 2011.

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Omniture Recommendations

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. Omniture Recommendations stacks up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in ecommerce, publishing, or advertising, Omniture Recommendations should be on your short list. Omniture is one of the largest providers of SaaS, delivering trillions of transactions. Omniture Recommendations is integrated into Omniture’s leading marketing suite, anchored on SiteCatalyst, the leading Web analytics solution, and augmented by a broad partner accreditation and integration program. Omniture has effective and extensive client care capabilities, covering strategy, tactics, implementation, training, and ongoing optimization.

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RichRelevance Recommendations

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. RichRelevance’s RichRecs stacks up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in retail ecommerce, RichRelevance’s RichRecs should be on your short list. Its automated optimization of its myriad recommendation strategies gets retailers closer to their specific goals, with the least possible manual effort. RichRelevance’s service delivery gets very high marks from us as well.

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Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A decade ago, merchants and publishers saw the recommendations on Amazon’s site and wanted it. A decade ago, they had to spend a fortune to get it. Today, recommendation engines can be had for some hundreds of dollars a month and can be implemented in a few days. My guess is that recommendations will be ubiquitous within the next three to four years. I’m always optimistic on these guesses, but since recommendations are widely available as a service, rollout can be very swift. SaaS offerings greatly simplify the technology aspect of implementation and virtually eliminate up-front costs, making it relatively easy for customers to sign up with a vendor. Nevertheless, choosing a vendor wisely is always better than choosing often. To aid in that choice, I offer a set of requirements and evaluation criteria set forth in this evaluation framework. And I will be evaluating a number of the leading products using the framework during 2010, leading to a detailed comparison.

Read a sample of this report.
About Susan Aldrich.

IBM's Enterprise Content Management Strategy: Bigger than ERP?

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

IBM's vision for ECM encompass all the activities involved in creating, using, managing and extracting value from unstructured information, both physical and electronic. IBM is bringing an ERP-style vision for content management to a world that suffers separate, uncommunicative applications for each enterprise function. The full value of unstructured information can never be achieved until we move from fragmented content tools to enterprise content services.

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Search Marketing and Findability Trends

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

During the past decade, solutions targeted at ecommerce search have become rich marketing platforms at the same time that marketing suites and recommendation engines have also emerged to own the online marketing The result: marketers have more confusing options from which to choose. We offer a pocket guide to choosing the right solutions as well as five principles for marketers who are gazing at the current industry landscape of offerings and considering a purchase to improve customer acquisition and/or conversion.

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Ecommerce Search Product Comparison

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There are many technologies deployed to connect customers with products on ecommerce Web sites. In this report, we review five leading ecommerce search offerings. This report has two parts. A companion to this report is a spreadsheet with a detailed, side-by-side comparison of all the criteria described in our Ecommerce Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, covering seeker interfaces, seeker experience management, marketing management, information collection management, architecture, and product and company viability. This report summarizes the data in spreadsheet and analyzes the key strengths of each of the five products.

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How to Think About Search, Revisited

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Why is a good search experience still so hard to deliver? I think search experiences are, in fact, better than in 2004, when I last analyzed this question. Rising expectations lead us all to demand more. But the real issue, I think, lies with the intractability of the findability problem and how technology and practices stack up to solving it. The cost of delivering great search, given today’s tools, is still too great for most organizations too much of the time. But there are actions you can take to make search work better for your users than it does today.

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Footwearetc.com Walks Your Way

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Footwearetc.com’s modernization efforts have made it a leader in its use of technology, its methods, and its customer experience. Its results tell you all you need to know: average order value is up 15 percent overall, and the click through rate on email marketing has quadrupled.

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Search Product and Company Update 2H2008

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Our second half recap shows customer activity remains strong, on a par with 2H 2007; product releases continue at the usual pace; but hiring has slowed, there has been more change in executive management, and more packaged solutions are being offered.

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Ecommerce Search Evaluation: Omniture Merchandising

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In October of 2008, Omniture acquired technology assets from the now-defunct Mercado. These assets have been integrated with the Omniture analytics family to create Omniture Merchandising, available since January 2009. The resulting product is a very strong search, navigation, marketing, and merchandising platform.

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What Belongs on Your Customer Dashboard?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone needs a Customer Dashboard, a set of KPIs to ensure that the company can optimize customer-impacting operations and maximize revenues. Everyone has excuses for why theirs isn't implemented yet. We’re bringing you a few steps closer, with a set of KPIs, a rationale, and a method.

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Search Product and Company Update 1H 2008

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Our first half recap shows customer activity remains strong, on a par with 2H 2007. Product releases continue at the usual pace, but hiring has slowed, international expansion is on hold, and there may be some downward pressure on margins. There is also a new tide of consolidation beginning.

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Five Steps in Selecting a Search Engine

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Following these five steps to successfully selecting a search engine, or even using just some of these steps, will greatly increase the success of your search selection, and of the implementation project that follows. One word of advice: Keep your vision for your search project at the front of your thoughts and make sure that every decision will move you closer to the ultimate goals of the investment.

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Ecommerce Search Evaluation: Mercado Ignition

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Mercado, which has been the leader in the area of merchandiser tools, has now extended its leadership role into search interfaces. With Mercado Ignition, the fifth version of its search offering, Mercado establishes leadership in the ecommerce search experience and merchandising effectiveness. Retailers and consumer-like B2B will be hard pressed to find a better solution for ecommerce search and merchandising.

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Ecommerce Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 1

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

To simplify the selection of products that can contribute to ecommerce success, we've developed our framework for evaluating ecommerce search products and architectures. This framework provides evaluation criteria for seeker interfaces, seeker experience management, marketing management, information collection management, architecture, and product and company viability. We also provide our recommendations on search-related metrics and responsibilities. Use this blank matrix to evaluate your own alternatives, whether custom-built or off-the-shelf. Or turn to our in-depth reports to get the matrix already filled in for leading products.

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Ecommerce Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 1

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Connecting customers with all the products they need requires the right balance of technology, management, and skills. Our updated ecommerce search evaluation framework provides technology criteria as well as our recommendations for responsibilities and metrics for findability and quality of seeker experience. This framework is a version of our enterprise search evaluation framework, specialized for ecommerce. Version 3 of our enterprise search evaluation framework, covering all search requirements in the enterprise including ecommerce, was published in December 2007.

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PSGroup Comparison Matrix: Ecommerce Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Our detailed review of five leading ecommerce search offerings from Celebros, Endeca, Fredhopper, Mercado, and SLI Systems has produced both a side-by-side comparison across our 230 criteria, and also our ranking of the solutions based on performance against our criteria. The real bottom line is that each of these solutions is well worth considering. All five products performed very strongly. This comparison matrix is a companion piece to the “PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Ecommerce Search Solutions,” which presents our analysis of this data. The data is extracted from separate reports for each of the products, which analyze the product against the requirements of the framework.

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PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Ecommerce Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

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End-to-End Search Marketing and Customer Experience

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

There is no question that search drives revenue: it brings customers to your site, it connects customers to products, and it can be used to trigger relevant offers on your site. Making the most of your search opportunity isn’t simple: you have SEO, paid search, paid inclusion, advertising, site search, and site merchandising. All seem to have different paradigms, tools, reporting, and lingo, and making trade-offs can be a challenge that few people we surveyed were able to successfully surmount. But there are steps you can take to optimize your customers’ search experience and reap increased and more profitable revenue as a result.
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Search Product and Company Update - Part 2, 2007

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Our annual recap of search company activity concludes that 2007 was a pretty good year for the seven publicly-traded technology companies on our watch list. The six gained more than 8,000 customers; there were very significant acquisitions that strengthened product portfolios and market positions, and all but one had significant product announcements.

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Airbus's Super Jumbo Content Challenge

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

When Airbus began work on the A380 Superjumbo aircraft, it also began work on building a new documentation system, one that could support a million pages of custom documentation for each aircraft and a thousand people developing the content. Axel Sellmer, Manager IS for Repair and Customer Services Germany, and his team developed the software and systems for technical documentation. This report describes the exacting requirements of the A380 documentation projects, and the systems Axel’s team developed to satisfy those requirements, which includes a layered technology architecture and an atomic information architecture.

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Search Product and Company Update - Part 1, 2H2007

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Our review of 17 privately-held vendors on our search technology watch list shows that customers’ appetite for search technology continues to be strong, roughly equal to the very hot first half. All but one of these vendors acquired more customers this year as compared to last year, and revenue growth is enviable. Hiring has moderated after a crazy first half, but 10 of the companies have changes to the management team. The delivery of new technology was also impressive. We’ve added five European companies to our list, all of whom are establishing offices in the U.S. and multiple European countries.

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Five Principles of Customer Engagement

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Some two-thirds of consumers who said they visited an online store intending to make a purchase left the site because the retailer did not provide enough information upon which to make a decision. Engagement is everything a merchant does to get and keep customer attention. In the uncertain economy of 2008, customer engagement may prove to be the key to retail success. Our five principles are tried and true approaches that can help you produce a fresh, engaging experience.

SLI Systems Learning Search Ecommerce January 2008

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

SLI Systems Learning Search Ecommerce is a strong solution, with unmatched automation and integration, optimization and automation of search engine marketing; automated management of site search experience; and strong scalability. This solution should be on the short list for retailers, including those selling content.

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Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 3

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

In our enterprise search planning and evaluation framework, we present the criteria that we believe are important when evaluating how well any given offering will support an organization’s needs. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns. You can use this matrix to notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating.

Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 3

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Successful delivery of the right seeker experience--for customers, partners, investors, employees, and other stakeholders--requires the right balance of technology, management, and skills. Our updated enterprise search framework provides technology criteria as well as our recommendations for responsibilities and metrics for findability and quality of seeker experience. This framework replaces the enterprise search framework of 2006, and also encompasses our frameworks for product search and customer service search.

Avoiding Search Pitfalls

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Search projects fail for all the reasons any project fails, but there are a few obstacles that loom especially large for search. Understanding the worst pitfalls of search can help you avoid them—or at least put a name to your current misery. We’ll go further than naming what ails you, and outline a path to sidestep the big mistakes and offer advice on how to escape the holes you’re already in. Our advice is primarily for search project and program leaders. The big problems all belong to you.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 1, 1H2007

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Our review of the 15 privately-held vendors on our search technology watch list shows that customers’ appetite for search technology is growing. All but two of these vendors acquired more customers this half as compared to last half, and revenue growth is enviable. The delivery of new technology was also impressive. And a new trend that will prove interesting for our next review is accelerated hiring: there are 228 open positions currently posted on these vendors Web sites.

The First Big Mistake in Search and Knowledge Projects

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The biggest mistake you can make in your search project is virtually unrecoverable: failure to establish and communicate the right vision. It is particularly difficult pitfall to avoid for search projects, because search projects have a project and program lifecycle for which many project teams—and their colleagues—are not prepared.

In establishing your vision, you must set a significant, desirable, achievable goal. To communicate it, you must present a simple, familiar and evocative story that helps anchor people to the project, tell them what to expect, and help them think through what will happen and what it will mean.

We offer two stories from history, which serve as examples of successful vision and which you can potentially use as metaphors—stories—for your search project: Man on the Moon, and Central Park Restored.

Customer Support: Success with Knowledge Management

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

In May 2007, we had the opportunity to join a meeting of nine empolis GmbH customers discussing their progress in automating the creation and use of knowledge assets in customer support knowledge projects at Fujitsu Siemens, Moeller Group, Nokia Siemens Networks, Siemens A&D, Siemens SIS, O2, and Versatel.

Each of the teams at the meeting described their projects, issues, and results, which we recap in this report. We also observed a developmental model, and we map the participants’ accomplishments against that model.

Enterprise Search Evaluation: Endeca Information Access Platform V.5.1 Evaluation

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Endeca is an ecommerce search leader, with the top three U.S. e-retailers in its customer set. With the release of Endeca IAP V. 5.1, significant features make it a strong offering for enterprise search, in particular search on the complex, multidimensional relationships inherent in structured data.

High Technology Search and Navigation Test Drive

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

In this test drive, we set out to compare how well search vendors on our watch list are supporting customers who are seeking information about their products. We chose a simple question and then charted our search and navigation experience in finding answers at Web sites of four enterprise search vendors: FAST, Google, IBM, and Oracle.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 2, 2H2006

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The nine publicly traded companies on our search vendor watch list had a great 2H2006, gaining more than 3,000 customers, and announcing significant new products and releases. Business intelligence and analytics continues to be a focus area for these vendors.

Enterprise Search Evaluation: Mercado CSN V.4.0

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Mercado CSN V4.0, released in January 2007, fur-ther strengthens its top notch merchandiser console. CSN is designed around the merchandiser’s tasks and job, making the search engine work for the mer-chandiser rather than making the merchandiser work for the search engine. It provides the greatest flexi-bility for controlling search, navigation and offers that we’ve seen.

Enterprise Search Evaluation: Celebros Qwiser Salesperson V.4.0

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Celebros Qwiser Salesperson V.4.0 is an ecommerce search solution with a strong presence in Europe and the US. Its chief strengths are Celebros’ managed search service offerings, the question-based approach to search refinement, and the range of options for controlling retrieval and ranking.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 1, 2H2006

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Our semi-annual recap of search company activity concludes that 2H 2006 was a strong period for the 12 privately-held technology companies on our watch list, and that 2006 was terrific overall. All 12 companies had significant product announcements and customer wins in 2006. We’ve added four companies to this periodic report, reflecting their growing significance in the market.

Enterprise Search Evaluation: Fredhopper Access Server V.6.0 Evaluation

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Fredhopper Access Server is a compelling offering for ecommerce search, merchandising, and marketing. Its chief strengths are its search engine optimization and marketing functions, which are highly automated. Its European origin make it well suited for large-scale, multi-country, multi-brand requirements. Its ability to handle frequent, extensive updates have made Fredhopper quite successful in the travel vertical as well. Fredhopper’s target market is Europe.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search V. 10.1.8 Evaluation

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search’s second release, 10.8.1, is an attractive alternative for intranet and embedded search applications. It lacks the specialized support we think you need for merchandising and customer support, but has strong APIs, services, and search federation.

Enterprise Search Solution RFP Template

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Customers have been very successful using Patricia Seybold Group’s Enterprise Search Solution Evaluation Frameworks to evaluate and compare vendor offerings. We’ve incorporated that framework into an RFP template you can use to develop a great Enterprise Search Solution RFP. While the framework provides an important element of an RFP for a search solution, there are two additional critical elements that belong in your RFP: information about your situation, and the specifications for your proof of concept. The purpose of this template is to help you collect and present all the information vendors need to prepare great bids for you.

Site Search Self-Assessment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Are you uncertain whether your Web site search is “good enough” or needs improvement? Do you know what the potential value of improving the search experience might be? Our self-assessment guide steps you through four key tasks to arrive at answers that are driven by data and analyses rather than anecdote: Identify site audiences and scenarios; review current search experience data; assess performance against audience expectations for search; and gather key stakeholders’ expectations and aspirations. You can spend a few days and get an instructive first take, or spend a few weeks and gather a compelling business case, using this self-assessment.

Self-Service Resolution: Cable TV Companies

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Our customer self-service test drives are based on customer scenarios. In this report, we delve into an HDTV problem resolution scenario, comparing the Comcast search experience to those of Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon. Overall, the search experience was poor. None of the vendors offer any capabilities to refine the results or navigate the results by type of information or other attribute. None attempted to guide me through a resolution process. None made use of the context of my search or navigation actions. And, although none of the sites had the content we sought, two of the companies, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, made it difficult to discover that further search would be fruitless.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 2, 1H2006

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

So far, 2006 has been a mixed year for search vendors, but a very strong year for those that are privately held. This report recaps the results for the eight privately-held companies whose search offerings we follow: Endeca, Fredhopper, InQuira, MetaCarta, Mercado, Recommind, SLI Systems, and X1. All showed increases in revenues and number of customers, and four of them reported double or triple the customer acquisition enjoyed during 2H 2005.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 1, 1H2006

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

So far, 2006 has been a mixed year for search vendors. This report recaps the results for the eight publicly-traded companies whose search offerings we follow: ATG, Autonomy, EasyAsk (a division of Progress Software), FAST, Google, IBM, Knova, and WebSideStory. All showed increases in revenues and number of customers, but in general customer growth and income are less than 2H2005.

What Differentiates the Search Experience?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Vendors of premium search technology claim their ecommerce site search solutions will produce a better search experience and differentiate your store from those of your competitors. We take a close look at four online department stores: Bloomingdales.com, Macys.com, NeimanMarcus.com, and Nordstrom.com. These stores use four different premium search engines. And yet, they exhibit essentially the same site search behaviors, and score both hits and misses for seeker experience. The differences lie not in the search engine technology deployed, but in the management of the search experience.

Search Experience Metrics

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

There are four customer outcomes that can’t be achieved without great site search, and customers have stringent requirements for search effectiveness. Those requirements map directly to four key performance indicators for search effectiveness and search value we’ve identified. We also offer a set of operational metrics that will direct and monitor your efforts to improve the search-driven KPIs.

Seeker Experience Survey

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Our May 2006 survey indicates that most people remain frustrated with their own experiences and with the seeker experience delivered by their companies. While it is encouraging to note that most are investing in trying to improve the experience, they are still for the most part struggling to overcome the four big mistakes we've identified.

Bloomingdales.com

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Bloomingdales.com is the online delivery vehicle for the Bloomingdale’s high-fashion, trend-setter customer experience. We evaluate Bloomingdales.com’s customer experience using Patricia Seybold Group’s E-Merchandising Framework, which rests on the four Es: environment, education, emphasis, and excitement. Highly successful ecommerce sites in B2B and B2C effectively employ the four Es we’ve identified. Bloomingdales.com achieves a high score when measured by our criteria.

Macys.com

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Macys.com, like Macy’s stores, is a trusted advisor to upper and moderate income customer segments. We evaluate Macys.com’s customer experience using Patricia Seybold Group’s e-merchandising framework, which rests on the four Es: environment, education, emphasis, and excitement. Highly successful ecommerce sites in B2B and B2C effectively employ the four Es we’ve identified. Macys.com achieves a high score when measured by our criteria.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 2, 2H2005

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Overall, 2005 was a strong year for search vendors. This report recaps the results for the six privately-held companies whose search offerings we follow: Endeca, InQuira, MetaCarta, Mercado, Thunderstone, and X1. All showed increases in revenues and number of customers.

Product Search Research Collection

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Are your customers, partners or employees frustrated with searching but not finding? Are you trying to improve your online navigation?

Product search is the key to delivering a great buyer experience at your site. A premium search solution can help you generate more leads, close more sales, increase your value per sale, and shorten your time-to-close.

This collection of eight reports is designed to directly assist in your selection process. We provide a detailed evaluation framework, based on customer and buyer requirements, and a set of 42 criteria for assessing the right search solution for your needs. Then we provide analysis, review, side-by-side comparisons, and rankings of five of the leading solutions.

The research collection provides the following reports:
- Evaluation Framework – 42 criteria for determining your requirements
- Bull’s-Eye – PSG’s ranking of the five solutions
- Comparative Matrix - Side-by-side comparison of the five solutions
- ATG Commerce Search V.2006.1 - In-depth product review
- Endeca InFront V.4.7 - In-depth product review
- FAST ImPulse V.2.0 and 3.0 - In-depth product review
- Mercado CSN V.3.0 and 3.5 - In-depth product review
- WebSideStory Search 3 - In-depth product review
This set of reports reflects a complete cycle of our research, and contains the information you need in order to make an informed decision leading to a successful ecommerce site.

Search Product and Company Update - Part 1, 2H2005

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Overall, 2005 was a strong year for search vendors. This report recaps the results for the eight publicly-traded companies whose search offerings we follow: ATG, Autonomy, EasyAsk (a division of ATG, Progress Software), FAST, Google, IBM, Knova, and WebSideStory. All showed increases in revenues and number of customers.

Knova Self-Service V.6.5: Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Customer self-service is critical both to cutting costs and to delivering a great customer experience. But a great customer experience demands a great seeker experience. We’ve developed an evaluation framework for customer self-service and support search, and have evaluated a number of products using it. Knova Self-Service 6.5 is the latest of these, and should be on your short list.

PSGroup Bull’s-Eye: Product Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Following our in-depth analysis of five leading product search offerings, we compare and rank them. The five offerings are ATG Commerce Search, Endeca InFront, FAST ImPulse, Mercado CSN, and WebSideStory Search. Our criteria include retrieval and results management (seeker’s experience); merchandising management; design and development; architecture; and company and product viability. While the five offerings differ significantly, in summation the scores for the products cluster around the Patricia Seybold Group Bull's-Eye rings 2 and 3. None of the products hits the center of our Bull's-Eye for all criteria.

Emerchandising Framework

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Patricia Seybold Group’s framework for emerchandising rests on the four Es: environment, education, emphasis, and excitement. Highly successful ecommerce sites in B2B and B2C effectively employ the four Es we’ve identified. These key factors should be your organizing principles for your product marketing efforts and investments.

Product Search Solution Feature Comparison Matrix Round 2

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve developed a product search solution framework to help you select the product that is best for you, minimizing the time and risk of that selection. The framework has five major evaluation criteria: retrieval and results management, merchandiser support, design and development, architecture, and product marketing. Each of these major criteria has multiple sub-criteria. This report, our second product search comparison, presents a matrix of our evaluations of five product search solutions: ATG Commerce Search V.2006.1, Endeca InFront V.4.7, FAST ImPulse V. 5.0, Mercado CSN V. 3.0, WebSideStory July 2005.

Product Search Solution Evaluation Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In our Product Search Solution Evaluation Framework, we present the criteria that we believe are important when evaluating how well any given offering will support an organization’s needs. In the framework, we emphasize repeatedly that each organization is different, with different skills and requirements, and, as such, you should evaluate which features are important to your situation and which may be able to be traded off without harm. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria, in matrix form (as in the Framework) with blank columns, in which you can notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating. Feel free to delete features which you don’t require and to highlight those capabilities that are of highest priority in your environment.

Search Goals for 2006: Yearning to Find It All

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Internet search has come a long way from the days when “car” and “cars” were treated as unrelated terms. But there are three key areas where Internet search lets us down: valuable information is not available to search engines, valuable information is available but ignored by search engines, and results are not sufficiently actionable.

ATG Commerce Search V.2006.1 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

ATG Commerce Search is part of ATG’s ecommerce strategy. The technology comes from ATG’s acquisition of the customer service application firm Primus in November of 2004. The integration of the technology into ATG’s family results in a very strong merchandising and marketing environment. It also enables a strong cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer experience. We think you’ll be impressed.

InQuira Self-Service and Support Search Update

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

InQuira 7.2.3 stacks up so well against our customer service search evaluation criteria that we’re going to have to raise the bar. Key to InQuira’s solution are its new seeker intent features, which identify seeker intent and associate it with answers and appropriate actions. Management interfaces and reporting capabilities have been expanded to support intents, and to increase the effectiveness of your search management resources.

Verity Ultraseek V. 5.4 Enterprise Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Ultraseek is an acceptable choice for enterprise search when evaluated against the technology criteria in our enterprise search evaluation framework. But Ultraseek can’t seem to settle down: it was acquired from Inktomi in 2003, and is now about to become an Autonomy product, pending Autonomy’s acquisition of Verity. Its stepchild status does not encourage confidence in its long-term prospects. Still, there are situations in which it is an appropriate choice.

Google Search Appliance Enterprise Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

In evaluating Google Search Appliance against our enterprise search evaluation framework, there are a few areas where Google shines. The level of automation provided by an appliance, such as Google Search Appliance, is unparalleled. But the appliance doesn’t support navigation and successive refinement, fundamental requirements for an adequate seeker experience. This doesn’t mean there is no place for Google in the enterprise; it is worthy of consideration as an adjunct to other findability tools.

Endeca InFront V.4.7 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Endeca’s InFront search solution is being used by more than 100 customers, including the top three U.S. retailers, and distributors such as Arrow Electronics, Fastenal, and W. N. Brady. Endeca popularized dynamic navigation and married it to a strong merchandising console designed to be used by merchandisers. Endeca’s implementation services extend beyond search and navigation to include Internet search and advertising, targeted campaigns and customer experience. InFront matches up to our product search evaluation framework in almost every particular.

WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition: IBM’s Enterprise Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition 8.2.2 stacks up very well against our enterprise search evaluation criteria. OmniFind uses the UIMA architecture for its structure, and also uses third-party UIMA participants to specialize and extend the OmniFind solution. Since OmniFind requires WebSphere Application Server and DB2, it is obviously targeted at WebSphere customers. If you are a WebSphere customer, you should put OmniFind on your short list, especially if your goal is to establish a single platform for search for all applications.

IBM’s Strategy for Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

IBM has made four announcements in recent months that collectively have big impact on the search market. UIMA provides an open architecture and framework for services on unstructured information; the UIMA SDK makes the framework and associated tools available to developers. OmniFind 8.2.2 delivers an IBM search solution built on UIMA that incorporates components from successful search vendors such as iPhrase, InQuira, and Endeca, as well as from text analytics vendors such as SAS Institute and SPSS Commerce. The OmniFind announcement, as well as the commitment to open source UIMA, creates a new ecosystem that changes the search solution playing field.

Survey: How Companies Apply Software to Improve Customer Service

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We surveyed business and technology managers to identify their customer service goals, plans, and investments. The survey results validate what we have observed for some time: Customers in all industries want self-service support from all types of suppliers. Technologies that enable effective customer self-service through a consistent cross-channel customer experience are well understood, well proven, and widely used.

iPhrase OneStep InterAct V.5.1 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

iPhrase has delivered a round of enhancements to OneStep that make it a strong customer service solution both for Web self service and for contact center applications. In particular, the new Management Console and the additional tools for speeding implementation vault OneStep to the front of the pack.

Monitor Your Quality of Customer Experience(SM)

Susan Aldrich — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Quality of experience (QoE) has been getting more attention these days, for very good reason—executives have become uneasy about how well their systems deliver services. But we think Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) is a different metric, representing far more important issues than QoE. QCE metrics include the IT responsiveness metrics currently connoted by QoE, but, more importantly, they measure customer outcomes and customer moments of truth. If you aren’t delivering for your customers on these fundamentals, your customer relationships are on shaky ground.

Autonomy IDOL Server V.5.0 Enterprise Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Autonomy IDOL Server V.5.0 is a strong enterprise search solution that stacks up well against our evaluation framework. IDOL provides great taxonomy support, including automated classification and several industry taxonomies, concept-driven navigation, and unique support for collaboration and rich media. IDOL Server is a search infrastructure, not an application, and it does not provide search tuning interfaces for non-technical information managers. On balance, IDOL is a strong contender, and we recommend it be considered for your short list.

WebSideStory Search Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

WebSideStory Search, formerly known as Atomz search until acquisition in May 2005, is a hosted search solution. Hosted solutions require less up-front investment and virtually no operational effort: the host manages software integrity, availability and performance, and troubleshoots and fixes all bugs. WebSideStory Search is designed for teams that want a reliable search service and don’t want to constantly fuss with tuning search results and offers.

Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine V.3.0

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine is a very low-cost enterprise search solution targeted at a technical customer who wants a high degree of customization. Its 17,000-node taxonomy is a big plus for customers who are struggling with organizing their own wide-ranging collections, and its automatic classification a big help in getting organized.

Interviewing Customers for Your Customer Scenario Mapping Session

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

In the Customer Scenario Mapping methodology, pre-session customer (and partner) interviews provide the insight you need in order to design great Customer Scenarios, establish effective mapping teams, identify the right internal stakeholders to participate, and set the right expectations internally. Our guide to planning and executing the pre-session customer interviews includes a sample script and our tips for success.

Knova Self-Service V.6: Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Knova Self-Service V.6 offering for self-service and support Web sites uses natural language processing, automatic classification, and knowledge mapping ontologies to create a strong information management and retrieval environment. It also provides capabilities for managing resolution, including the Resolution Flow Engine and strong reporting. Knova Self-Service V.6’s search engine stacks up well against our self-service and support search solution evaluation framework.

Establishing Customer Experience Metrics Using Customer Scenario Maps

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Customer Scenario® Maps reveal what matters most to customers, and how they measure the quality of their experience, their suppliers, and their own success. You can use this information to create a measurement framework to track the Quality of Customer ExperienceSM (QCESM) you’re delivering.

Thunderstone Search Appliance V.5.4 Enterprise Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Thunderstone Search Appliance provides an alternative approach to buying search software and a hardware infrastructure to run it. An appliance rises from the box like Venus from the ocean: fully formed. Thunderstone Search Appliance stacks up well against our enterprise search evaluation framework. It has an important advantage over the traditional appliance: If and when you outgrow the capabilities of Thunderstone Search Appliance, you can migrate to the full capabilities of Texis, the licensed software underlying the appliance.

Discovering Findability Requirements from Customer Scenario Maps

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A high-quality customer experience generally rests on your delivery of an adequate seeker experience. So understanding your customers’ findability requirements is critical—but it’s hard to do. You have to get inside your customers’ heads. Our findability requirements discovery methodology explains how to do this.

Read a sample of this report.
About Susan Aldrich.

Web Services: What Companies Cared About in 2002

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

In 2002, our first Web Services survey revealed that a whopping 84 percent of our customers were considering Web Services investments. This report analyzed what customers were doing with Web Services as early as 2002, what obstacles they were facing, and what technology investments they were considering.

Enterprise Search Solution Evaluation Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Our Enterprise Search Solution Evaluation Framework presents the criteria that we believe are important when evaluating how well any given offering will support an organization’s needs. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns in which you can notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating.

FAST ImPulse V.5.0 Product Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

FAST’s ImPulse V.5.0 is a search-derivative application built on FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform. This architectural approach provides stability and depth for core search functions, while providing a solution tailored to product merchandising and commerce. ImPulse provides strong support for teams of merchandisers to create and tune promotions, including real-time analysis of click-throughs and an approval workflow. ImPulse stacks up very well against our product search evaluation framework criteria.

Managing Findability: Critical Core Competency

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

People are frustrated with finding usable information inside the corporation, and with publishing usable information to the customers who need it. Companies won’t succeed in solving the findability problem unless they invest in the new stewardship roles and new findability programs we outline in this report.

Read a sample of this report.
About Susan Aldrich.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Web Services Solutions: Best Standardized, External Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading Web Services Deployment Environments. See how seven vendor solutions stack up when we assess their support for your Standardized and External Phase of Web Services.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Web Services Solutions: Best Controlled (External) Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading Web Services Deployment Environments. See how seven vendor solutions stack up when we assess their support for your Controlled and External Phase of Web Services.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Web Services Solutions: Best Preparatory, Internal Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading Web Services Deployment Environments. See how seven vendor solutions stack up when we assess their support for your Preparatory and Internal Phase of Web Services.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Web Services Solutions: Best Exploratory Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading Web Services Deployment Environments. See how seven vendor solutions stack up when we assess their support for your Exploratory Phase of Web Services.

Mercado CSN V.3.0 Product Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Mercado’s new release of Commerce Search & Navigation, CSN 3.0, has terrific interfaces for teams of merchandisers tuning and testing offers. Those interfaces, and the product’s support for multivariate testing and analysis, are strong differentiators for CSN.

Evaluating Self-Service and Support Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Over the past several months, we’ve published our evaluations of seven self-service and support search solutions against our framework. We’ve also published Bull’s-Eye reports that compare the products against the key evaluation criteria of the framework, and a side-by-side feature comparison. Alphabetically by supplier, the products are: EasyAsk Enterprise 9, Endeca ProFind, FAST Data Search, InQuira, iPhrase OneStep, Kanisa, and Primus Enterprise Search. This report is the final chapter in the documentation of our current self-service and support search research project. We offer our observations and conclusions about the research project, the framework, and customer and partner self-service and support search.

PSGroup Bull’s-Eye: Self-Service and Support Search Solutions: Best Overall Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Concluding our in-depth research in products offered for customer self-service search, we rank each of seven solutions against our evaluation framework. We also identify the customer circumstances each product best addresses. The solutions rank in this order: Knova, iPhrase, ATG, Endeca, InQuira, FAST, and EasyAsk. But the bottom line is, each of these products should be on your short list.

PSGroup Bull’s-Eye: Self-Service and Support Search Solutions: Best Architecture Features

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

This Bull’s-Eye report is our ranking of the architecture features of self-service and support search products from seven vendors: EasyAsk, Endeca, FAST, InQuira, iPhrase, Knova, and Primus. In our comparative scoring, three of the vendors hit the Bull’s-Eye: FAST, iPhrase, and Knova.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Self-Service and Support Search Solutions: Best Design and Development Features

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Concluding our in depth research in products offered for customer self-service search, we rank each of seven solutions against our evaluation framework. We also identify the customer circumstances each product best addresses. The solutions rank in this order: Primus, Knova, Endeca, InQuira, FAST, iPhrase, and EasyAsk. But the bottom line is, each of these products should be on your short list.

PSGroup Bull’s-Eye: Self-Service and Support Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

This Bull’s-Eye is our ranking of the search management and tuning capabilities of self-service and support search products from seven vendors: EasyAsk, Endeca, FAST, InQuira, iPhrase, Knova, and Primus. In our comparative scoring, three of the vendors hit the Bull’s-Eye: Endeca, InQuira, and iPhrase.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Self-Service and Support Search Solutions: Best Retrieval and Results Management

Susan Aldrich — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

This Bull’s-Eye is our ranking of the retrieval and results management capabilities of self-service and support search products from seven vendors: EasyAsk, Endeca, FAST, InQuira, iPhrase, Knova, and Primus. In our comparative scoring, three of the vendors hit the Bull’s-Eye: iPhrase, Knova, and Primus.

Self-Service and Support Search Solution Comparison Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Self-service and support search is comprised of technologies and daily tasks that that enable your site to guide a customer (or other user) to the resolution of his problem, perform research, and get answers to questions. We have evaluated seven products against our Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Framework. This report presents a side-by-side comparison of all seven solutions for 23 criteria.

Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Our Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Framework presents the criteria that you should consider when evaluating a solution. We’ve used this framework to evaluate seven of the leading offerings. To assist you in your evaluation of self-service and support search products, we offer the criteria in matrix form with blank columns in which you can notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating.

Primus Enterprise Search V.4 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Seekers want easy access to good answers, and information owners want to ensure quality results with a minimum of daily tweaking and adjusting. Primus Enterprise Search from Primus Knowledge Solutions is a premium search engine that addresses both those needs. Primus Enterprise Search stacks up very favorably against our self-service and support search solution evaluation framework.

Strategic Planning for Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The range of problems search engines will address, and the value of findability, will increase steadily through 2007. An acceptable level of findability requires some new investments in technology and information management tasks--plus leadership. We propose six actions and requirements that you should add to your current plans and thinking. You’ll be better prepared to meet your organization’s findability needs in the next two to five years.

How to Think about Search

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Just about everyone we talk to is dissatisfied with how well their applications connect people with information. Briefly put, lots of people think search is terrible. We believe that the dissatisfaction reflects a focus on the wrong problem. The problem is not search. The problem is findability. If you think the problem is search, you focus your attention on your search technology. When you realize the problem is findability, you can broaden your focus to embrace the three factors of findability: the search engine, the filing system, and seeker knowledge. “Filing” is the bugaboo; it consists of two very difficult problems: consistency and making sure that your filing system reflects the way everyone thinks.

FAST Data Search V 4.0 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Customers want the control they get from self-service, and business executives want the internal efficiency and the customer loyalty that comes from providing a great self-service experience. That great experience rests on great findability, supported by a strong search engine. FAST Data Search certainly qualifies, stacking up favorably against our self-service and support search solution evaluation framework.

Self-Service and Support Search Solution RFP Template

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Customers have been very successful using Patricia Seybold Group’s Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Framework to evaluate and compare vendor offerings. We’ve incorporated that framework into an RFP template you can use to develop a great Self-Service and Support Search Solution RFP. While the framework provides an important element of an RFP for a search solution, there are two additional critical elements that belong in your RFP: information about your situation, and the specifications for your proof of concept. The purpose of this template is to help you collect and present all the information bidders need to prepare great bids for you.

InQuira Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

InQuira’s offering for enterprise search and self-service and support sites uses natural language processing technology to create strong support for concept extraction and management. InQuira offers fine-grained controls to information owners for search management, and it uses seeker context information to enhance the seeker experience.

Endeca ProFind V4.5 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Companies selling online depend on good product findability for their success. Good findability is the result of good merchandising, good product information, and good search technology. A premium search engine can fix problems with merchandising and product information, so it is well worth reconsidering your search strategy. ProFind, Endeca’s offering for enterprise search and self-service and support sites, offers great search and navigation technology and great tools for spotlighting relevant content for your users.

EasyAsk for Commerce V.9.1 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Self-service and support search solutions should provide efficient retrieval of answers for customers, partners, and your call center representatives, while making it easy for information owners to tune the search experience. If seekers reach a dead end in their journey, you need self-service and support search features that make it easy to engage seekers in a dialogue, guide them, and, when necessary, escalate their request from Web to email or phone. EasyAsk for Commerce is a premium search engine that offers advanced linguistic capabilities and dynamic navigation, enabling a high-quality seeker experience. This report evaluates EasyAsk for Commerce search against our self-service and support search evaluation framework.

iPhrase OneStep V. 4.7 Self-Service and Support Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

iPhrase OneStep is a premium search engine that has been packaged for the self-service and support arena with email deflection and analytics. This report evaluates iPhrase OneStep against our self-service and support search evaluation framework.

Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Framework

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We define self-service and support search as the technologies that enable your site to guide a customer (or other user) to resolving his problem, performing research, and getting answers to questions. Our Self-Service and Support Search Solution Evaluation Framework guides our research into the effectiveness of various vendor offerings, and it should guide yours as well. Our evaluation criteria are based on customer requirements, and we describe our assumptions in enough detail that you can identify which requirements are the most and least important in your situation. Using our evaluation framework, especially in conjunction with our detailed product evaluations, will help you make the right search solution choices.

Evaluating Product Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Over the past several months, we’ve published our evaluation of seven product search solutions against our framework. We’ve also published Bull’s-Eye reports that compare the products against the key evaluation criteria of the framework. The products, alphabetically by supplier, are EasyAsk Commerce Advisor, Endeca InFront, IBM WebSphere Commerce, iPhrase One Step, Microsoft Commerce Server, Oracle Text, and Verity K2 Catalog. This report is the final chapter in the documentation of our current product search research project. We offer our observations and conclusions about the research project, the framework, and product search.

Product Search Solution Feature Comparison Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 20 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve developed a product search solution framework to help you select the product that is best for you, minimizing the time and risk of that selection. The framework has five major evaluation criteria: retrieval and results management, merchandiser support, design and development, Architecture, and product marketing. Each of these major criteria has multiple sub-criteria. This report presents a matrix of our evaluations of seven product search solutions against that framework. The products we’ve evaluated are EasyAsk Commerce Advisor, Endeca InFront, IBM WebSphere Commerce, iPhrase One Step, Microsoft Commerce Server, Oracle Text and Verity K2 Catalog.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Product Search Solutions: Best Overall Product Search Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading product search solutions. See how seven vendor solutions stack up against our entire product search evaluation framework: retrieval and results management, merchandiser support, design and development, and Architecture.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Product Search Solutions: Best Architectures

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading product search solutions. See how seven vendor solutions stack up against our product search evaluation framework when we assess their Architectures. Architecture is our category for the operational management, scalability, availability, structure, organization, and security aspects of the product search solutions.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Product Search Solutions: Best Design and Development Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading product search solutions. See how seven vendor solutions stack up against our product search evaluation framework when we assess their support for design and development. Design and development comprises the product features that support the setup and deployment of search capability, including ingestion, indexing, transformation, and use of existing metadata.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Product Search Solutions: Best Merchandiser Support Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading product search solutions. See how seven vendor solutions stack up against our product search evaluation framework when we assess their merchandiser support. Merchandiser support is our category for the tools provided to merchandisers to tune the buyer experience, make relevant offers, and personalize the buyer experience. Three of the solutions we evaluated hit our Bull’s-Eye.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Do you already have the search technology you need to connect buyers with your products? If you use Microsoft Commerce Server, you have a basic search engine. Depending on your product line and your customers' buying habits, that just may be enough. Microsoft Commerce Server 2002, Microsoft's e-commerce server solution offers great tools for merchandisers and developers.

PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Product Search Solutions: Best Retrieval and Results Management Capabilities

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading product search solutions. See how seven vendor solutions stack up against our product search evaluation framework when we assess their support for retrieval and results management. Retrieval and results management is our category for the product features that support search and navigation approaches, the selection and ranking of results, and buyers’ navigation and management of results. The category addresses the organization and presentation of search results, including the features that ensure the buyer is neither overwhelmed with choice nor presented with no results or guidance.

E-Merchandising at drugstore.com

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The online health and beauty store, drugstore.com, has organized its merchandising and marketing teams and automated its keyword management to enable a consistent customer experience from Google to shopping cart. At the same time, the merchandising and marketing teams are running a continuously changing array of site promotion and search engine ads and managing a 30 percent annual turnover of SKUs.

Product Search Solution RFP Template

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Customers have been using our Product Search Evaluation Matrix in their RFPs for search solutions. But we think you need more than the just our matrix in order to get great bids and choose the best solution. You need to provide certain key information about your company and situation, and you need to design concise and precise proof of concept tests. We’ve prepared an RFP template you can use as your starting point for creating a perfect RFP for your situation.

Verity K2 Catalog 5.5 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Companies selling online depend on good product findability for their success. Good findability is the result of good merchandising, good product information, and good search technology. A premium search engine can fix problems with merchandising and product information, so it is well worth reconsidering your search strategy. K2 Catalog, Verity’s offering for commerce sites, offers great search and advanced capabilities for making recommendations.

Using Search Engines to Find New Customers at the American Institute of Physics

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The American Institute of Physics, a scholarly publisher, reached a huge new market by creating a new platform for sometime and one-time buyers. The new platform leverages AIP’s taxonomy and highly structured product data and makes it very easy to buy an article. And by focusing on search engine compatibility within the site, AIP provides a seamless experience for seekers who start their journey at an Internet search engine.

Endeca InFront V.4.1 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Companies selling online depend on good product findability for their success. Good findability is the result of good merchandising, good product information, and good search technology. A premium search engine can fix problems with merchandising and product information, so it is well worth reconsidering your search strategy. InFront, Endeca’s offering for commerce sites, offers great search and navigation technology and great tools for merchandising and for re-forming product data.

iPhrase One Step V.4.5 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Product search requirements differ markedly from enterprise or Internet search; only product commerce search has such as strong focus on enabling a great buyer experience, empowering the merchandising team, and interconnecting with enterprise applications. In this report, we’ve evaluated iPhrase One Step against our Product Search Evaluation Framework and conclude that One Step should be on your product search solution short list.

IBM WebSphere Commerce V.5.5 Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

If you have IBM WebSphere Commerce, you have a product search engine with integrated marketing and merchandising capabilities. Whether it meets your current and future needs, or whether you should be planning on adding advanced product search technology, depends on your merchandising organization, your product information, and your customer set. This report evaluates IBM WebSphere Commerce search against our product search and discovery evaluation framework.

Who Needs a Premium Product Search Engine?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

A premium search engine isn’t the whole answer to product findability, but it plays a big part. Does your situation demand a premium search engine, or would your money and energy be better spent on improving product data and merchandising skills? We offer a quick self-assessment check list for you to determine your situation.

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Wisdom V.2003

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

During December’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, we sampled perspectives and experiences from search engine vendors, providers of marketing and optimization services, and marketing executives who rely on search engine behavior. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization require a combination of divination and scientific method. But there are some certainties and some time-tested truths, as well as ways to cope with search engine uncertainty.

Oracle Text, Part of Oracle Database 10g, Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

You very likely own a strong product search solution: Oracle Text, which is shipped with the Oracle database. Before you pull out your wallet to buy more search technology, check out our evaluation of Oracle Text against our product search solution evaluation framework.

Product Search Solution Evaluation Framework

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

A product search solution helps merchandisers connect buyers with the products they need, when they need them. Our Product Search Solution Evaluation Framework guides our research into the effectiveness of various vendor offerings, and it should guide yours as well. Our evaluation criteria are based on customer requirements, and we describe our assumptions in enough detail that you can identify which requirements are the most and least important in your situation. Using our evaluation framework, especially in conjunction with our detailed product evaluations, will help you make the right product search solution choices.

Product Search Solution Evaluation Matrix

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Our Product Search Solution Evaluation Framework we presents the criteria that you should consider when evaluating a solution. We’ve used this framework to evaluate seven of the leading offerings. To assist you in your evaluation of product search and emerchandising products, we offer the criteria in matrix form with blank columns in which you can notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating.

Developing Your Plan of Attack for Your ECM Initiative

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

People who own the enterprise content management effort in their organizations are facing a daunting task: thousands and thousands of documents and files, widespread involvement in creating content, ingrained practices for authoring and revising, enthusiasm for and resistance to change. How do you place your first bet on a project that will succeed in its goals and convince the organization that it’s worth the effort to tackle another clump of content? We provide a guide to assessing your content collections and a litmus test for choosing an initial project.

EasyAsk Commerce Advisor Product Search Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Product catalogs have search requirements that differ markedly from enterprise, Web, or document search. The best search solutions enable a great buyer experience, empower your merchandising team, and leverage every bit of that great product data you have strewn about your company. EasyAsk Commerce Advisor is a solution that should be on your short list for product search.

Computer Associates International Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) 3.0

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Computer Associates, a key contributor to OASIS Web Service Distribution Management specification, will release Unicenter WSDM 3.0 by year-end 2003. The first release of Unicenter WSDM will offer service level management for Web Services, including discovery of Web Services you may not realize are available in your environment.

Three Steps to Success in Cross-Business Interactions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Executives are attracted to the streamlining potential of connecting customers, suppliers and partners via Web Services and portals. While technologists are exploring these new capabilities, business executives need to explore the impact on relationships. We offer a framework you can use with key customers and trading partners to synchronize your interaction expectations, commit to new levels of trust and responsibility, and strategize on timeframes for closing gaps in current capabilities.

Novell’s iChain 2.2 Single Sign-On Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

When using Web Services or portals to interact with other companies in your trading circle, you need unified identity management, including single sign-on. Novell’s iChain 2.1 offers an attractive solution for identity management and Web single sign-on.

Securing Trading Partner Interactions: Two Approaches Supported by New Standards

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

There are two approaches to securing automated interactions between members of a trading circle, both supported by new standards. Provisioning, or user administration, is an approach to access control that is used by virtually every company; SPML is a new specification that simplifies and automates multi-company provisioning. Federation is an approach to orchestrating security, wherein trust is brokered among the participating companies, and each interaction carries security directives; WS-Federation is a new language specification that defines the protocol for brokering trust and works in conjunction with the other specifications in the WS-Security family.

BMC Software’s CONTROL-SA 3.2 User Provisioning Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Value chain integration, Web Services, privacy regulation, and cost reduction all urge you toward implementing automated user provisioning and getting control of access control. BMC Software’s CONTROL-SA user provisioning (a.k.a. user administration) solution offers a durable and scalable solution for mid- to large-size companies.

Grand Central Communications: Web Services Backplane

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Grand Central provides Web Services backplane services as a managed third-party network service. Grand Central’s network-based services simplify deployment and change management across disparate customer and partner applications and network Architectures by enforcing, monitoring and mediating a broad range of business- and IT-level policies. From a business perspective, this revolutionary “meet-in-the-middle” subscription service enables enterprises to become more agile and effective in the way they provide value to their customers, allowing them to integrate their business’ processes more deeply and to deliver differentiated value-added services throughout their extended enterprise.

Service-Oriented Architecture FAQs

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 08 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Here is a handy definition for services and service-oriented Architecture, classification for services, approaches to governance, and critical success factors for achieving the benefits of a service-oriented Architecture.

Borland Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 24 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Borland Enterprise Server V5.2.1 is a J2EE Application Server popular in the low- to upper-mid-range server market, and Borland’s Web Services Deployment Environment. Its CORBA underpinnings provide a strong performance and reliability profile, despite the low price. The three million developers using Borland development tools have a natural affinity for Borland Enterprise Server, which is being offered as part of the Borland Suite Application Lifecycle Management solution.

What Does Availability Actually Mean?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Five 9s availability has become such a popular concept that it is getting in the way of actually managing services, business impact, and corresponding investments. We recommend four categories of measurements to take control of your business and your IT performance.

HP’s Web Services Management Game Plan

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 03 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

HP has been prominent in Web Services intellectual activity from the beginning. The investment is beginning to pay off as HP OpenView begins to deliver Web Services management capabilities. Moreover, HP is taking steps to ensure that its investment in management standards keep HP in the center of the Web Services management industry.

AmberPoints Web Services Backplane Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

AmberPoint, a young company that has already cemented key relationships with IBM and Microsoft, offers Web Services management solutions. Management Foundation and Service Level Manager provide visibility and management based on the business content of Web Services traffic. They excel at handling Web Services post-development, which puts AmberPoint in a strong position to manage the wave of Web Services arriving soon with SAP, Microsoft Office, and other big software.

Responding to Linux Threat, Sun and Microsoft Messaging Are in Lock Step around “New” Discovery

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Sun and Microsoft have announced very similar strategies in response to “new” customer requirements for reliability and simplicity. Underneath the verbal silliness are plans, products, and programs that, in fact, have the potential to help customers simplify and cut operations costs.

Sony Broadband Services Builds Web Services Infrastructure

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Web Services deliver tremendous benefit when coupled with a services-based Architecture. The evolution to a services-based Architecture can be speeded by implementing a Web Services backplane, which provides core services to be used by all systems and applications. The backplane also provides the framework for creating, sharing, and managing application- and system-level services. In tackling their interoperability requirements, this is exactly the approach taken by Sony Broadband Services. In a matter of months, the company implemented its Web Services backplane to support interoperability and shared services using Blue Titan and BEA WebLogic Server.

Web Services Security Issues and Antidotes

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Web Services encourage new, high-value interactions that will exacerbate some old familiar security issues. These new interactions will tend to be multi-hop and multi-company, which will stress the patchwork of security mechanisms that guard your assets. Five key requirements surface with high priority.

Communicator, Inc., Hub ID, A Security Broker for Linked Enterprises

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Business executives see the value in connecting with trading partners to streamline processes, but IT executives see obstacles. One of these is security, especially identity services. Communicator Hub ID is a managed service for digital identity management and Single Sign-On (SSO).

EASI Security Unifier Suite: Security Backplane from Quadrasis

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Enterprise security infrastructures are being stressed by Web Services and portals. In particular, achieving Single Sign-On (SSO) has become more urgent, and new requirements to secure new multi-hop, multi-domain, and multi-enterprise requests have emerged. These are issues that Quadrasis, a business unit of Hitachi, solves with EASI Security Unifier Suite.

SAP Puts Web Services in Mainstream

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

On January 16, 2003 SAP announced NetWeaver, a new application platform, and Enterprise Service Architecture, a new structure for SAP application services. This announcement will have profound effects on the IT landscape, efficiency of businesses, and how rapidly companies adopt Web Services.

Web Services Backplane: Infrastructure for Web Services

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The experience of early adopters demonstrates that the Web Services Backplane is your next critical Web Services investment. There are strong arguments for buying services used for your backplane. In this Report, we discuss the two critical features to consider in making your selection.

Blue Titan Network Director: Web Services Backplane

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We see the Web Services Backplane as your next critical Web Services investment. Blue Titan’s Network Director provides backplane services that enforce the delivery of the Quality of Service for Web Services interactions on any platform or network.

Lessons Learned from Analyzing Web Services Deployment Environments

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

After in-depth reviews of eight leading Web Services Deployment Environments, we have some lessons and observations to offer to both customers and vendors. One of the strongest lessons was that security is not the most difficult challenge for Web Services.

Comparison of the Leading Web Services Deployment Environments

Susan Aldrich — Wed, 27 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We used a detailed matrix of criteria to assess how well seven leading Web Services Deployment Environments support you through the lifecycle of Web Services. This matrix, including phases, detailed requirements, and vendor scores are presented in this report.

PSGroup Bull’s-Eye: Web Services Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed detailed assessments of the leading Web Services Deployment Environments. See how seven vendor solutions stack up when we assess their composite support for all phases of Web Service deployments.

Web Services: Doomed and Critical to Success

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 17 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Early adopters have a short list of big issues with Web Services. The shortcomings of current offerings may mean that early Web Services are doomed, but companies are nevertheless investing heavily with an eye to future improvements and future business value.

High Tech Companies Grade themselves on the Quality of Customer Experience(SM) they Offer

Susan Aldrich — Sun, 22 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

How you evaluate yourself on how well you provide a Quality of Customer Experience seems to depend on what your role is in your organization. Results to our survey from respondents in high-tech companies indicate that, the closer you are to customers, the more you realize how much better you could—or should—be doing.

Cysive Applies Web Services to Create Flexible Business Scenarios

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Cysive’s Cymbio Interaction Server is a high-end interaction and business process composition environment. It simplifies the composition and execution of flexible business interactions by abstracting device and back-end application interfaces via rules, profiles, and Web Services, and it provides the underlying core services that make programmers highly productive and business systems reliable and flexible. Cymbio Interaction Server V2 runs on any J2EE Application Server or any JVM with a servlet engine.

Web Services Sell Groceries at Tesco.com

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 29 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Tesco, the leading UK grocer, is also the world’s leading Internet grocer. A new version of the home-shopping application uses Web Services to greatly improve the customer experience--and Tesco’s flexibility for the future. Web Services enable Tesco to also reach Pocket PCs and intermittently-connected devices so customers can place orders during otherwise squandered commuting time, our idea of a great way to restock the cupboards.

Sun One Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 22 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

In the not-so-distant future, your Web Services will support a growing community of users, applications, and systems. Now is the time to carefully consider the environment those Web Services will be running in, and Sun ONE Application Server is one of the leaders in J2EE-based Web Services deployment environments.

Big Surge in Value of Web Services

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 15 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Web Services have the highest potential value enabling cross-organization business interactions. Commitment to Web Services has been hampered by lack of standards for how to specify complex transactions that route activities among trading partners and re-sequence activities according to conditions. Three new standards—BPEL4WS, WS-Coordination, and WS-Transaction—developed and proposed by IBM, BEA, and Microsoft, promise to fill that gap.

Oracle9iAS Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Oracle’s commitment to Web Services is demonstrated in all Oracle’s product plans. Oracle9i Application Server Release 2, available in May 2002, provides a strong Web Services Deployment Environment.

BEA WebLogic Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Some day soon, your Web Services will be in use by an ever expanding list of users, applications, and systems. Now is the time to carefully consider the environment those Web Services will be running in, and BEA’s WebLogic Server is one of the leaders in J2EE-based Web Services deployment environments.

MICROSOFT.NET Framework Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 27 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft is committed to XML Web Services, with supporting technologies and features pervasive across the Microsoft product line. Microsoft’s Web Services deployment environment is provided by the .NET Framework, which also offers infrastructure services you should consider using to underpin Web Services architectures for both .NET and Java-based Web Services.

IBM Websphere Application Server V5 Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 13 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

IBM is the leader in encouraging, enabling, and employing Web Services. IBM’s primary Web Services deployment environment is WebSphere Application Server (AS), a J2EE application server in the mid- to high-end server market. With V5, the WebSphere Web Services story gets stronger with new features including new Web Services Infrastructure Services.

IBM WebSphere AS V4 Web Services Deployment Environment

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The Internet made us want to get connected with our customers and suppliers, and Web Services have emerged to solve some of the issues that surfaced as companies tried to connect processes to make it easier for customers to do business. IBM is the leader in encouraging, enabling, and employing Web Services. IBM WebSphere Application Server (AS) V4, the leading J2EE application server in the mid- to high-end server market, is IBM’s primary Web Services deployment environment. WebSphere AS also provides Web Services Infrastructure Services and business process choreography support for Adaptive Business Process Environments.

Why Build Web Services Using Vendor-Provided Core Services?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The Web Services specifications and standards have brought new focus on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). From the standpoint of reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and productivity, it is critical that common services be isolated from business logic rather then coded into each application. Early adopters and vendors of Web Services technologies are in the process of identifying required Web Services Infrastructure Services. Is it better to use vendors' versions of core services or to build your own?

Macromedia’s Web Services Deployment Solutions

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 23 May 2002 00:00:00 GMT

How do you get started learning and using Web Services technologies without much risk? One obvious way is to use the Web Services capabilities of the development and deployment environments you already have. Macromedia’s ColdFusion MX and JRun Web application environments have been extended to enable your developers to quickly create Web Services and deploy them to your J2EE or .NET platforms.

Anatomy of Web Services:

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 May 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Business and IT leaders responsible for customers, channels, supply chain, and product strategy see exciting opportunities in Web Services. We’ve established five categories of Web Services technologies: Web Services development and assembly; Web Services deployment environments; UDDI and directory services; Web Services infrastructure services; and adaptive business process environments. This analysis presents our take on the roles and goals that business and IT leaders have in making Web Services investment decisions.

The Web Services Freight Train

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 May 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Web Services are on a swift adoption curve because they solve expensive and intractable business and tech-nology problems. Corporate caution on technology adoption will be superseded by pressure from customers and suppliers. As a result, by 2006 Web Services will permeate corporate applications portfolios.

Finding Meaningful Answers with InFact

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 25 Apr 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Most search technology we interact with works well when we understand the collection of content we are searching, the taxonomy of the content, and the subject—and when we don’t mind separate searches for struc-tured, unstructured, Web, and local data. Insightful, a leader in data mining, has just introduced InFact, a text min-ing, analysis, categorization, and retrieval solution. InFact’s analyses enable it to understand equivalent meanings of sentences, extract facts from images, recognize underlying themes, and retrieve lists of answers rather than lists of documents.

Systinet Web-Services Deployment: WASP 3.0 Advanced Server for Java

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Apr 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Systinet, a young Cambridge-based company, has achieved early technology leadership with WASP, its product family for building, testing, deploying, discovering, and using Web services. WASP Servers are highly-extensible environments for deploying, managing, and delivering Web services. The WASP Server is designed to withstand the waves of change as the Web-services technology arena matures, and its pricing model is designed to accommodate your company’s Web-services maturation as well.

Netreflector InstantSurvey for Customer Feedback

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 28 Mar 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Improving your customer’s experience with your brand starts with understanding who your customers are, establishing what the experience should be, and then assessing where you are now. Surveys are the only way to collect some of the critical data you need. InstantSurvey from NetReflector is a hosted customer-feedback life-cycle service that supports survey creation, distribution, management, analysis, and reporting.

Where Do We Stand on Customer Value and QCE?

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Mar 2002 00:00:00 GMT

How well do you manage by and for customer value and monitor and improve the Quality of your Customer ExperienceSM? During the course of our research into how leading companies manage their customer relationships, customer experience, and customer strategy, we have identified a body of best practices and critical success factors. These learnings reflected in our QCESM Readiness self-assessment questionnaire. To date, 1,371 executives and key manager have responded to the survey, using technology developed and hosted by ResponseTek, a customer-experience-management solution vendor. The results, summarized in this report, indicate that practice has not yet caught up with strategy.

Covasoft’s Application Management Solution

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Does the world need yet another application management solution? Our observations of public-facing applications suggest that, no matter how many solutions have been offered, the problems of bad application behavior persist. Covasoft, a new entrant in the application management space, offers solutions that can be extended to accommodate your unique environment. Covasoft’s CovaOne solutions are targeted for specific environments, including BroadVision Retail Commerce Suite, BroadVision One-to-One Enterprise, BEA WebLogic application servers, and Vignette Content Management. What’s interesting and possibly unique about CovaOne solutions is that they contain both business and IT metrics.

ResponseTek’s Customer Experience

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Executives who understand the bottom line impact of delivering the right quality of customer experience are measuring customer satisfaction and customer outcomes. But collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback is no simple matter. The most difficult of the tasks is enabling the company to act on customer feedback: identifying the person responsible for acting on each issue and alerting the right person with a prioritized list of to-do’s. While there are a number of tools and solutions available for each of these problems, ResponseTek, a software and consulting firm, addresses the complete customer and employee experience lifecycle: create and setup, distribute and launch, collect, react, analyze, manage, plan, and improve.

Endeca: Don't Search, Navigate

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 03 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Somehow, we have come to accept the fact that searching, querying, mining, and analysis are separate tasks, supported by separate technologies. But, in our brains, these tasks are more like a continuum--we're looking for relationships, collections with certain characteristics, each discovery leading to a new question. Endeca Navigation Engine delivers the layer of abstraction that protects you from having to understand and use the collection of storage and retrieval mechanisms that surround your corporate data.

Get Better with Help from Your Customers:

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 03 Jan 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Customers have a lot to tell you about how to increase the value you deliver to them, make it easier to do business with you, and enhance your relationship. Customer surveys are expensive—for your company as well as for your customer. We've pared to the bone the questions that reveal customer attitude and those that tell you how to improve.

Framework for Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) Management

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 20 Dec 2001 00:00:00 GMT

A Customer Flight DeckSM is the surest way to make your organization’s culture more customer-centric. These metrics don’t replace existing measurements, but they put a customer focus in your company’s management decisions. Once you’ve convinced yourself of the value of measuring and monitoring what matters most to customers, and you’ve identified your metrics, how do you create your own living, breathing Customer Flight Deck? We offer an architectural framework for dealing with data collection, Customer Flight Deck presentation, and the layers in between.

Measuring Moments of Truth:

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 11 Oct 2001 00:00:00 GMT

The Future of Enterprise Management

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 06 Sep 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Enterprise systems management as we know it is on the way to irrelevance. The progression seems inevitable. In the recent past, managing business system elements such as NT platforms became a low-level, low-value task. System management vendors have stayed profitable by moving up the technology curve, managing higher-value enterprise services such as databases and ERP systems. But just as managing business system elements has faded in value, managing enterprise services will, in the future, become a low-level, low-value task. Within five years, we foresee that the value and relevance of today’s enterprise service management will rank no higher than NT platform management does today. The highest-value opportunity will reside in a new type of management solution.

Results of the Quality of Experience Benchmark Survey

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 16 Aug 2001 00:00:00 GMT

In January 2001, e-business executives were surveyed on their achievements using the Patricia Seybold Group’s Quality of Customer Experience Best Practices Benchmark. The survey was conducted by Filigree Consulting and incorporated responses from 216 companies. A Quality of Experience (QoE) rating was developed based on the relationships between these factors and respondent’s estimates of customer satisfaction. The results of this benchmark survey are analyzed and summarized in this report.

RX: Solve Critical Content Problems Today

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Lessons from FindMRO.com, the MRO Sleuth

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 21 Dec 2000 00:00:00 GMT

According to Ron Paulson, president of FindMRO, “FindMRO wants to be the sourcing service for every e-market. When customers search your catalog and fail to find what they are looking for, FindMRO is ready to take over. There are profits to be made in being the search of last resort.” The report discusses FindMRO’s business strategy and content initiatives.

Contending with Content

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 02 Nov 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Many businesses regard information as their “secret sauce.” Making e-business content a competitive advantage promises to be a Herculean effort that will overwhelm those with incomplete strategies and weak architectures. You need to understand the range of business issues, responsibilities, and skills involved in maintaining high-quality content; establish a content strategy; and assign content responsibilities to win the content wars.

Understanding the Requirements for E-Markets

Susan Aldrich — Thu, 17 Aug 2000 00:00:00 GMT

E-markets are in their infancy. They lack critical features, and their business models are problematic for suppliers. Suppliers may not see an ROI but don’t want to be left behind. Buyers wonder which e-market, which e-procurement application, and which trading network offers the best opportunity for procurement savings.

Early adopters will learn from their experiences, but should be very careful about planning on profits. As you weigh decisions on investing in e-markets, it helps to understand how today’s e-market customer experience stacks up against your customers’ requirements. This report will help you understand where you fit in and what the trade-offs are.

How Do You Manage Your E-Business?

Susan Aldrich — Tue, 14 Dec 1999 00:00:00 GMT

As business shifts to ebusiness, IT problems have become business problems. Electronic business systems, which automate business processes and allow customers to serve themselves, must have automated management systems.