Forrester WaveTM Names Squirro Cognitive Search as 'Strong Performer'

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Squirro is an organization that has always placed great emphasis on the quality of our products and services. It’s something we take particularly seriously so it is always a cause for satisfaction and celebration when our technology is recognized and acknowledged by industry experts.

And industry experts don’t come much bigger or more knowledgeable than Forrester, one of the most influential independent research and advisory firms around, and which has just named Squirro a ‘Strong Performer’ in The Forrester WaveTM: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019. This is a report that was published on May 29, 2019, and it looks at an important current technology development – contextual and cognitive search.

The Forrester WaveTM: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a particular technology marketplace. The Forrester WaveTM: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019 is a report that evaluates the top vendors in the cognitive search market against 24 criteria, which were grouped into three high-level categories: Current Offer, Strategy, and Market Presence.

The report notes that; “Squirro makes SaaS applications more clever, immediately. Squirro’s strategy is to use its core cognitive search solution for multiple prebuilt use cases spanning customer insights, service insights, and risk insights, and it is also available as an embedded Salesforce search service. Additionally, the company offers industry-specific cognitive search solutions for banking, finance, insurance, and manufacturing.”

In addition to being named a ‘Strong Performer’ in the report, Squirro bested all other candidates in the ‘Applications’ criterion, part of the Current Offer category, with a top score.

To be recognized in this way by an authority such as Forrester is hugely encouraging as we continue to provide our customers with the best possible service with our cognitive search product.

The Importance of Cognitive Search

Cognitive search has become a truly important technology over the past few years, as the inadequacies and inefficiencies of traditional enterprise search have been laid bare. The principal elements of search were mostly developed decades ago, but it took a long time to come to market and traditional enterprise search in 2019 is simply not fit for purpose.

It is far too time-consuming, is not always accurate, and is a major drain on knowledge workers’ time. Searching through customer data, industry news, and analytics reports just isn’t an efficient use of company or individual time. Intelligent recommendations are the new search results, based on previous behaviors and likely intent.

This is what knowledge workers expect, based on their experience using search engines as consumers. But the rise of multiple file formats, as well as unstructured data, has meant the quality of enterprise search has suffered greatly.

Most unstructured data are not easily recognized and, filed by CRM platforms and other enterprise systems, is often inaccessible via enterprise search. Users could even sometimes be hunting for information that their enterprise does not even know it has.

Furthermore, the way in which people search for information at work is changing rapidly. Instead of actively searching for something, we’re starting to let the computer, website, or AI-based virtual assistant anticipate what we want and give it to us proactively, as is the way with so many consumer applications.

Squirro Cognitive Search

The future of enterprise search is linked directly to the emergence of cognitive computing, which is providing the framework for a new era of cognitive search. This recognizes intent and interest and provides structure to the content, capturing more accurately what is contained within the text.

This is the foundation of Squirro’s Cognitive Search platform, for which we were named a ‘Strong Performer’ in The Forrester WaveTM: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019. Squirro Cognitive Search has been shown to deliver vastly superior search results, providing a year-on-year reduction in search time of up to 90%, as well as recommendations to meet users’ specific intent and needs.

Because organizations keep records across so many different applications – CRMs, intranets, KM systems, ERP systems and much more – Squirro Cognitive Search allows knowledge workers to search over multiple enterprise systems and across a variety of unstructured data.

Organizations all over the world are reaping the benefit from Squirro Cognitive Search, with Swiss insurance firm The Helvetia Group a particularly noteworthy example. Helvetia is one of Europe’s largest insurance firms, providing many insurance and reinsurance products to consumers and businesses all over the continent.
It manages seven different web portals and receives around 115,000 searches on average every month across them. It had been using Google Search Appliance (GSA) but wanted to deliver better results to its five million customers, so in 2018 replaced GSA with Squirro Cognitive Search.

Google Search Appliance had reached the reach its end of lifecycle and The Helvetia Group wanted a solution that allowed for a more cognitive approach to search, anticipating customers’ requirements and incorporating free text, context, and relevancy when delivering results.

Squirro Cognitive Search is as suited to customer-facing search as it is for internal enterprise search requirements. It uses AI and machine learning to continually boost relevance and can be a hugely transformative product for any organization that wants to improve its search efficiency and accuracy.

Embedding Product Excellence in the Squirro DNA

Product excellence, and then the on-going improvement and enhancement of those products, is embedded in the DNA of Squirro. Because our CEO and co-founder Dorian Selz had previously founded and achieved great success with Swiss search platform local.ch – making it the market leader within four years – he understands the importance of delivering quality products and aims to do exactly that with every Squirro product and application.

This recent Forrester WaveTM looking at our cognitive search platform is just the latest example of that. In 2018 we were mentioned and cited in a number of other industry analyst reports, recognized for the innovation and intelligence in our products. Our main objective, of course, is to deliver great products to our customers and external recognition is just an additional reward.

The Forrester WaveTM: Cognitive Search, Q2 2019 was written by Mike Gualtieri, Srividya Sridharan, and Elizabeth Hoberman, and can be purchased here.

Or, if you’re interested in learning more about Squirro Cognitive Search and how it can overhaul enterprise search in your organization, then please click here.