More Berst-Kept Secrets: Verity's Star Search
Received: March 25, 1997 06:23am EST
From PC Week for March 24, 1997 by Jesse Berst
I'm back this week with another Berst-kept secret (my phrase for
overlooked companies and technologies). This time I want to tell you
about Verity, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that thinks it has found the superstar software of the next century. Philippe Courtot, Verity's
ultrabright, ultraopinionated CEO, believes information retrieval will
become the next essential application, taking its place beside word
processing, spreadsheets, databases and browsers.
If you know Verity at all, you probably know it as a company that
provides search engines for others. Late last year, Verity introduced
Search '97, which combs through a company's intranets, databases, E-mail and text files to create a master index, then gives users tools to manage that information.
SEARCH AND DESTROY.
Verity competes with search engine makers such as Fulcrum Technologies and Open Text. But Courtot is just finishing stage one of a three-stage strategy to destroy those rivals. Phase one was about ubiquity--getting the Verity search engine embedded into as many
products as possible. Phase two, set to start this year, will promote
the idea of "universal search"--a single product to find anything,
anywhere, on your computer, your company's network or the Internet.
Phase three, scheduled for 1998, will promote "a new metaphor for
information." Most people think search will be embedded into
applications. Courtot believes applications will be embedded into
search. Finding information will become so important that everyone will need a dashboard for cruising the information universe.
IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE.
To produce that ultimate information tool, Verity is building a search "platform," a framework into which it can plug multiple technologies. Today, full-text indexing is the basis of most search engines. Verity is adding additional functions, including automatic ranking, iterative querying (narrow your question repeatedly), automatic categorization (the computer "clusters" the information for you), navigation (steer between clusters and categories), notification of new information, direct delivery of information, agents that search for information according to your profiles, automatic summaries and information extraction (the computer "reads" the documents and learns about them on its own).
THE SEARCH IS NOT OVER.
Verity is not the only company on the trail of improved searching. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others have massive R&D efforts under way. Courtot believes searching will become so important that it grows into a must-have application. I believe it will become even more important.
That's why I believe Verity's ultimate competition is Microsoft. To be
fair, Courtot has faced this challenge before. When he took over cc:Mail in 1989, the company was a 12-person startup. Yet Courtot was able to best Microsoft and WordPerfect to emerge with a 40 percent share of the E-mail market.
Can Courtot play David to Microsoft's Goliath a second time? Search me. His grand plan is a long shot. Still, if you are searching for an
interesting company with breakout potential, you may not need to look
any further than Verity.
Jesse Berst is editorial director of ZD Net AnchorDesk, a free E-mail
and Web news service at www.anchordesk.com. Send comments to jesse@jesseberst.com.
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