February 7, 2008
Coveo highlights
I talked yesterday with enterprise search vendor Coveo. Here are some highlights.
- Coveo spun out of Copernic a few years ago. The only relationship between the companies now is that Coveo licenses Copernic’s desktop search product.
- Coveo has 60 employees.
- Coveo has 5-600 customers, including lots of big-name companies.
- Coveo’s pitch boils down to “inexpensive, easy to install, and no-apologies functionality.” Actually, Coveo also claims superior relevance and performance, but I’m not going to comment much on those until I have a chance for a more technical discussion.
- Example of ease of set-up: Coveo says Factiva downloaded the product on a Monday, called up and bought it on Thursday, and deployed it in production that Friday. This may be a growing industry trend. Attivio also features a “download first, talk to us second” distribution model. So do vendors of other kinds of “platform” software such as database management systems, application servers, or complex event/stream processing.
- Average selling price: $50K. Everything is included for one price unless it requires bundled third-party software (as is the case for audio, video, and OCR search).
- Coveo claims 90% head-to-head win rates vs. Google OneBox and Microsoft Sharepoint search. Generally, customers have other search products too (I guess that’s obvious, since Coveo has only been around 2-3 years). Sometimes they even have all-you-can-eat licenses to competitive products, but buy from Coveo anyway. Rule of thumb: Nobody’s head-to-head win rate is truly as high as they like to think, but companies that think their rate is 90% generally are doing quite well.
- Coveo cites a strong demand for text search of relational databases. Based on specific examples cited, this seems to mean text fields such as call center notes.
- Coveo offers audio/video search. Really, it’s just an audio search technology; what’s being searched on in videos is the audio part. And the audio search boils down to a speech-to-text transcription, with a search of the resulting text. Coveo’s key claim is that the error-laden text you get from speech-to-text conversion is sufficient for useful searching. Specifically, you do best searching for unusual words, such as proper names. In the case of telephone calls, which are low quality – perhaps 32 kb/sec – Coveo says there’s only 10-20% accuracy in word transcription. However, Coveo also says that the words that do come through are exactly the unusual ones most usefully searched on.
- Coveo also says that its speech-to-text lexicon is initially strengthened by text crawls. In general, while I didn’t ask, I would guess that the easy-installation story involves a fair amount of automated lexicon enhancement.
Categories: Audio and video search, Coveo, Enterprise search, Search engines
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5 Responses to “Coveo highlights”
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[…] before buying, but don’t try to extend it themselves. And, as I noted today in a write-up of Coveo, that extends well beyond open source. (A couple of other closed-source examples are Attivio and […]
I would be weary about using Factiva as a reference named account..they might have had Coveo in the past but they do not use it today….I was one of the engineers involved when we replaced it with something more substantial.
Troy,
What does Factiva use now?
Nice try, but Factiva/Dow Jones is a current Coveo customer. Coveo has not been replaced “with something more substantial”, but rather has been in continuous and happy use for over 4 years.
[…] Lesser enterprise search outfits never prospered much. (E.g., when’s the last time you heard mention of Coveo?) […]