Individuals and companies are taking increasing notice of the fact that millions of hours are wasted every day with inefficient search and retrieval, on the Web as well as on corporate intranets and extranets. Indeed, the time burn is costing companies in the billions every year in lost productivity and opportunity. One report from IDC, a New York-based industry research firm, says that a 1,000 employee company wastes $6 million every year on employees searching inefficiently or even fruitlessly for information that resides somewhere else.

Vivísimo’s Clustering Engine™ sends a query to multiple search engines simultaneously, just as other search tools, but then automatically organizes the results into meaningful, hierarchical folders that any user can understand and use productively to drill down to the right answers quickly. The company is taking search to the next logical level by making useful sense of the retrieval. It’s a precise niche of the search market that the industry giants such as Google have yet to fill, although some are beginning to try. (On July 1, Google introduced a new release of its enterprise search appliance which Vivisimo could enhance. Microsoft released its new search engine on July 1 which some critics are calling, ‘a raw start.’)

Yet, Vivísimo is not a search engine per se—it organizes the results of other search engines or database queries. As such, it doesn’t actually compete with the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google; it enhances them. With its focus on the enterprise and electronic publishing markets, it’s playing in an area where the results of a search more likely need to be the right answers rather than just the most popular as in web searching. And those answers need to be served up in a ready-to-use intelligent format, rather than a long list ranked by paid positions or popularity contests.

While Vivísimo says its point of differentiation is one of product quality—delivering the right answers in a meaningful way and ‘on-the-fly’—its market advantage may lie in its seamless integration with any technology platform, something others in the industry do not offer. Vivísimo’s products can work with virtually any existing technology infrastructure and that could be a deal breaker for many companies.

“Right now, corporations aren’t investing in large-scale technology deployments; they are figuring out how to leverage what they already have and Vivísimo’s product helps them do that,” says Chris Sherman, consulting analyst with IDC and associate editor of Search Engine Watch, which tracks the industry.

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