More Talk about Unicorn

I hadn't been hearing much from the SirsiDynix world lately, but today, I heard a whole lot. My boss is on a committee to investigate new search portals to lay over top of our existing GL 3.1 (Unicorn) ILS, and just attended the Sirsi SuperConference. Here's what I learned today:

From my boss: Aquabrowser and Primo and even Encore are much better developed than Sirsi's search portal (which is called EPS, I believe). Although my boss thought that Sirsi doesn't have federated searching, from looking at their website I think that they do, it's just not bundled in with their portal. Which I think is really stupid. Although, in an effort to keep their customers from running to open source or other options, I think that people at SD are trying to scare their customers--my boss has it in their head that open source software usually has no support attached to it. When actually, lots of third-party vendors are starting to support open source. Seems like a scare tactic to me.

The other interesting thing is that we talked a lot about how SD is going to stop supporting the C client version of Unicorn at the end of 2009, and that means everyone needs to either get onto Unicorn Java client, or face the fact that they are going to be left without support. Makes sense. C client SUCKS.

And while listening to all this, my boss also said "They're changing the name of Unicorn to Symphony. But it's just a name change."
Finally, real confirmation that Symphony is not the "blended model" that SD claimed it was to the Horizon users. I'm sure this is no surprise to any Horizon user anymore, but I do think it's interesting that Sirsi customers are getting all this comforting talk about how it's not changing at all, and Horizon customers were getting all this comforting talk about how Symphony is going to be great for them and how it ISN'T Unicorn (when many Horizon customers didn't get Unicorn for very specific reasons).

So anyway, thought I'd put all this information out into the interwebs. Fly free, little information!