It’s all about partners

Wow, the reception from around the industry on our Search Server Express announcement has been exciting! It looks like press coverage is helping to get discussions started: not just about our new products, but about what enterprise search can do for business productivity full stop. I admit the team and I are a bit giddy with hitting the milestone, announcing, and seeing how people are already starting to download and play with our bits. 

Industry analysts are also talking about the announcement. An interesting element of their reactions has been how, given their domain expertise, they've looked beyond the product news of the day and have zeroed in on something I think is important about our approach: our partners.

Both the Burton Group’s Guy Creese and Forrester’s Ken Poore called out the great partner opportunity (Guy calls our partner ecosystem the “hidden weapon” here) from federation partners via our support for the OpenSearch standard to services to - interestingly enough - verticalized software and appliance solutions.

We’ve always been a partner-led company but there is something really compelling about this given the relative youth of the enterprise search market today. One thing we believe is that the questions and answers that are most valuable vary dramatically depending on role, industry, and the apps and repositories in use, so partner expertise in these areas is going to go a long way toward realizing search's potential.

We’re already getting interest from all kinds of potential partners, some I’d never have thought of myself. We’ll need to do more thinking here and I hope to have more to share along this front as we talk to folks.

Jonathan Kauffman
General Manager
Enterprise Search