NIE offers Prepackaged Search Engine Planning

When companies would like to upgrade or replace their search engine, who should they call?  It's very easy to predict what each vendor will advise.

New Idea Engineering gets around this by offering a 2 week vendor neutral engagement to analyze the existing systems and plan a roadmap forward, with both strategic and tactical suggestions.  Some training is also provided.  The project can be customized as needed.  Sort of like having search experts in a box.

http://www.ideaeng.com/sbp/

Comments

[Vendor Neutral]

How can you do vendor-neutral evaluations when your firm has consulting engagements to implement a subset of vendor products? Sure seems like a conflict of interest to me.

[Mark Bennett]

Yikes, and good morning to you too. A fair question, thanks.

As analysts and integrators, we follow many more vendors than we formally partner with; and it’s not unheard of for us to recommend a vendor we don’t have a formal relationship with, based on our customer’s requirements. And of course we're open with our prospects and customers about our vendor relationships.

More importantly, we've actively covered other tools from companies we have no formal relationship with, not only here but also on our other sites and in presentations we give. We believe we're way more neutral than the individual vendors, and our customers tell us we are more neutral than the analysts who have traditionally covered this space. Some folks don't realize that the larger analyst firms often have those very same vendors as paid subscribers to their services.

Actually if you think about it most people in the industry, almost by definition, have relationships of some form with at least one vendor; we have relationships with many. And if somebody didn't have any current ties, they wouldn't have much new and relevant to say, since vendors would likely not give them much time.