Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
IBM Watson Content Analytics
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
IBM Watson Content Analytics is an enterprise search option. This supersedes IBM's older offerings, IBM Omnifind and IBM Content Analytics and Enterprise Search.
Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
If one is looking for a content crawling search engine (think "Google" but on your own private system), IBM Watson does a great job. It is also very good for locating duplicate files/folders and lost items. If document organization and searching is the goal, IBM Watson hits the nail on the head.
Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
IBM Watson is not quite in the same category as Worldox or NetDocuments as both are full-fledged document management. However, both vendors provide a similar searching and indexing product. Worldox provides searching and indexing but the Indexer is somewhat prone to issues. IBM Watson does not have the stability/consistency issues. NetDocuments is cloud-hosted document management and its index does not seem to have issues. That being said, there is a large premium as the data is all stored in a cloud container with the management system.
Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.
