BA-Insight

An Interview with Guy Mounier

Founded in 2004, BA Insight, a trademarked name, is a company providing software, applications, and services for Microsoft SharePoint and Fast Search technology. The company’s core product is Longitude Search and products make it possible for a SharePoint licensee to add functionality to a range of enterprise systems. BA Insight’s technology unifies access to document management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and social content systems. BA Insight’s approach previews a document without requiring the user to open another application. The goal of BA Insight’s approach is to reduce the time required for a SharePoint user to pinpoint information needed to complete a work task.

Headquartered in New York City, BA Insight maintains sales offices and research facilities throughout the United States and Europe. BA Insight’s global team, fortified by an expansive network of certified partners and resellers, has helped millions of users gain instant and actionable access to information. Hundreds of customers – including Fortune 500 companies such as Accenture and ExxonMobil, and government agencies such as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the Australian Department of Defense – have deployed BA Insight’s enterprise search solutions to take full advantage of their information assets while optimizing end-user productivity. BA Insight is a managed Microsoft partner.

The full text of the interview conducted on September 27, 2011, appears below.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Would you give me some background about BA Insight?

Delighted. I follow your Web log and these interviews.

As you may know, we founded BA Insight because we had experienced first-hand the pains of a large-scale enterprise information integration project. The trigger for BA Insight was our successful completion of a large search project for a Fortune 100 energy company.

The data integration challenges we experienced were not unique to me and my team. It was evident to us seven years ago and even more so today, that enterprise search technology would be the technology foundation for more cost-effective, unified information access platforms.

This is the situation today and is due to the fact that search platforms has significantly matured and can be connected to disparate data sources ranging from entirely unstructured content to highly structured data.

But as the search engines have matured it is more and more evident that search engines are to be considered solid technology foundations for search based applications (SBAs). Such applications are easier to set up and are much more versatile than traditional Business Intelligence (BI) platforms or enterprise portals and can, therefore, easily be adapted to the specific needs for individuals and their organizations.

Some analysts have been discussing the emergence of SBAs within the search and retrieval landscape for a few years now. The two key drivers of the adoption and ultimate success of SBAs are agility and adaptability.

Would you explain what you mean by agility and adaptability?

Agility is rapid deployment and immediate value one gets out-of-the-box. Agility turns out to be the key differentiator with other types of information access applications such as Business Intelligence, which traditionally require a larger upfront investment and extensive end-user training in order to realize measurable return on investment.

Adaptability in the context of SBAs characterizes the technology’s ability to automatically tailor to the industry, the department or the function a user is part of, without having to for instance pre-define an industry or department specific taxonomy. As a contrast to SBAs, a BI cube or BI report is essentially set in stone, expensive to change and maintain. Similarly, a conventional enterprise search tool does not learn from users' interactions, but often relies entirely on a predefined taxonomy which is even more expensive to change and maintain.

Our technology and our SBAs learn and improve based upon every user interaction and dynamically present the most relevant information context, straddling both structured and unstructured data, and driving beyond the capabilities of conventional business intelligence and search.

Aren’t other vendors offering search based applications as well?

Of course, but we believe BA Insight pioneered the creation of SBAs on top of the SharePoint 2007 platform, and more recently Fast Search 2010 for SharePoint. Our fastest growing SBA is called Legal Search for SharePoint and Fast, which provides the attorney with a 360 degree client matter view, securely surfacing their documents, emails, billing system information, and external references such LexisNexis or West KM in a unified manner.

I understand. Haven’t Endeca and Exalead have work flow components as part of their search platforms for a number of years? Endeca was founded in 1999 and Exalead in 2000, right?

Endeca and Exalead are true pioneers of search based Applications (SBAs). SBAs are the future, and the market has room for many more innovators. Endeca’s current market focus is on e-commerce and agile business intelligence applications. These are areas we are not targeting.

Here’s the important differentiator in my opinion:

Our approach to SBAs is to leverage the best-in-class search infrastructure provided by SharePoint and Fast Search, and not to compete directly with any enterprise search vendors. The net result is that BA Insight can focus on innovating on top of a mature enterprise search platform without having to worry about plumbing or platform extensions such as workflows. Our SBAs can present any relevant SharePoint workflow in the context of the information returned, and it also incorporates the collaboration and productivity features SharePoint delivers.

What does that deliver?

Microsoft provides the underlying search and collaboration technology infrastructure. BA Insight provides a full suite of connectors. These allow organizations to connect their search engine to in-house data sources as well as data sources in the cloud or at other off-premises locations.

We also provide a suite of advanced analytics components to optimize user experience.

Would you give me an example?

Yes, I am talking about rich preview and automatic relevancy feedback. New upcoming modules include federated search, visual refiners, expertise search, and automated classification of content. SBAs are rapidly assembled from these various components, typically within days or weeks.

What’s the technical foundation at BA Insight?

Great question, Stephen. BA Insight has a number of content processing experts on staff. The company founders built up their expertise on real-world enterprise search projects first in the legal and energy industries, and expanded out to a number of other industries.

Jeff Fried joined the company as our chief technology officer in 2010, and he brings with him more than 20 years of experience in the enterprise search and content processing fields. Prior to joining BA Insight, Jeff was VP of Advanced Solutions at Fast Search and Transfer, then Senior Product Manager for Enterprise Search at Microsoft following the Fast acquisition in 2008. Advanced Solutions at Fast Search and Transfer used to be the name of the division responsible for delivering SBAs to customers.

Is enterprise search going to remain a hot topic as we approach 2012?

Enterprise search is indeed a hot topic. Part of the reason is that search is understood as one of the most agile and cost-effective ways of delivering unified information access. There is a significant amount of research and development invested in scaling enterprise search infrastructure to handle very large volumes. In our view, both private and public cloud technology is accelerating the adoption of enterprise search solutions by helping drive down the of computation and storage.

Where does SharePoint fit into BA Insight’s market strategy?

SharePoint is at the core of our go-to-market strategy. SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest selling server product in history, with more than 100 million users. We have heard that 70 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies have already deployed or are in the process of deploying SharePoint. With the release of Fast Search for SharePoint, SharePoint is really considered the de facto enterprise search platform that other search vendors must differentiate from.

From BA Insight’s perspective, we think of SharePoint as the business collaboration and search infrastructure that companies are standardizing on en masse. We deliver on the last mile: The mission-critical business applications that maximize the licensee’s return on investment in SharePoint search. Our vertically-focused SBAs connect Fast and SharePoint to enterprise systems out-of-the-box. They also present the user with a unified view of enterprise information, regardless of its format and source. The alternative is to build these SBAs from scratch, with customized user interfaces and long system integration efforts. That is not an approach we typically embrace.

Where is your company’s investment in research and development taking the firm?

BA Insight has innovated in several critical areas over the past five years. We have methods for effectively processing a large volume of data. We can compute a not-readily-available incremental update in a way that maintains a high level of performance. Another BA Insight innovation is our approach to building schemas for mapping complex user and group security models into a unified identity model definition. We now include this capability as of our connector offerings.

Are you acquiring patents on your systems and methods?

Yes, the company was recently granted patent No. 7,890,485 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its technology to automatically assess the usefulness of a particular piece of content based on end-user behavior, and leveraging our AptivRank algorithm to boost search relevancy.

The key to this innovation is the clear separation within the search context of the data visualization steps (for example, a preview of most relevant pages, search inside document, navigate outline, etc.) from the consumption steps (for instance, bookmark, download source document, share to colleague, etc.).

Would you provide me with some color on this method?

Of course, to draw a quick parallel to Google’s PageRank search method on the Internet, Google-like methods are trying to measure accurately how many users linked to the content at hand and use the “score” to influence ranking.

As you know, in the enterprise and most enterprise content, there are no hyper-linking structures to analyze to understand what users deem relevant content. Therefore, the only way to systematically capture such feedback as part of the user natural workflow is AptivRank. The alternative workflow of requesting manual feedback, while valuable, is difficult to enforce in the enterprise space.

Are there other innovations you can describe?

Let me also mention that we have invested in research related to cloud-based data fusion technology. We plan to release our first application within weeks. Our overall strategy in this regard is to leverage the cloud’s inexpensive, elastic and massively scalable storage and computing resources to perform extreme parallel information integration and processing tasks. Until recently, the costs for performing data fusion on premises were beyond the reach of quite a few organizations. With our method, we can crack some of the tough data access challenges associated with a legacy datacenter infrastructure.

We know that organizations leveraging SharePoint and BA Insight technologies have benefited from these innovations in two fundamental ways.

Click image to enlarge.

What are they?

The first is that our solutions have delivered up to 90 percent reduction in risk, cost, and time required to integrate SharePoint with other enterprise and line of business systems.

The second is that our approach has delivered a quantifiable two to three times increase in content find-ability and re-purposing.

Would you give me an example?

Most of our engagements are viewed as confidential. However, you may find case studies on our web site. I can describe one engagement which has been converted to a brief case study. [Editor’s note: the publication is available at http://goo.gl/IhEJv]. Representative of our work is the implementation of search at Fenwick & West, a leading law firm. the firm was struggling with an under-performing search solution. BA Insight implemented a SharePoint centric solution and used our Longitude Connectors to provide the partners and authorized users with secure, reliable access to the firm’s information.

What about performance?

That was a highlight of the project. I remember our first benchmark for Fenwick & West’s managing partner. That query for a complex litigation query ran across three separate document repositories, the firm’s external Web site, and several line of business enterprise applications. The system generated 2,560 relevant hits to the matter in less than two seconds. Our search systems performance continues to improve due to our continuing investment in research and development.

And the law firm was happy?

Yes, quite happy. One of the partners told me that the BA Insight solution increased attorney effectiveness and enhanced client effectiveness. For a firm with several hundred attorneys and multiple offices in the United States, our search solution for the first time allowed Fenwick & West attorneys to find complete and relevant information regardless of its physical location in the firm’s multiple offices.

Some vendors point out that mash ups are and data fusion are the way information retrieval will work going forward. How does BA Insight perceive this blend of search and user-accessible outputs with consumer-like approaches?

We agree that data fusion is a core component of the information retrieval practices of the future. We also believe that the cloud is the catalyst infrastructure model that can make data fusion an achievable reality, as unifying both structured and unstructured data in a meaningful way has been historically cost-prohibitive for most organizations.

Over the past five years, we have also seen a sharp decrease in the market’s appetite for complex and costly information integration efforts. Timeframes for deployments are now measured in hours and days, not weeks or months. End-users shy away from complex information access interfaces that require expert-level customization and training. This phenomenon is very much tied to the consumerization of information technology. Organizations are asking, “Why can’t enterprise IT be as easy as the applications I consume for personal use?”

Are you an Enterprise 2.0 firm?

BA Insight was founded at the start of the Enterprise 2.0 era with the fundamental understanding from real-world experience that information integration projects should not be so complex. Seven years later, we made out-of-the-box information integration a reality. We also made a self-learning search experience a reality.

Without divulging your firm's methods or clients, will you characterize a typical use case for your firm's search and retrieval capabilities? What's the upside for the users of your system?

We have in the search industry spent quite some time discussing technology and innovation, but for customers, the focus is very much on solving a specific business problem and use case. The way BA Insight goes to market is by selling Search Based Applications (SBAs). As examples we have deployed many types of SBAs, ranging from legal search, expertise search, research portals, to customer 360 degree views.

What’s expertise search?

Expertise search is an interesting application and is mission-critical in professional services organizations. It solves the challenge of finding experts in the organization based not only on their profile tags, but also on more reliable indicators such as the volume and usage rates of content the expert published on a particular topic, how much billing hours one charged on the topic, and job title relative to the company’s organizational map.

Is there a return on investment from search?

Many enterprises believe that the ROI of a search and collaboration initiative is too difficult to measure, but that is a myth.

With accurate analysis of end-user behavior and intent, one can quite precisely measure how efficiently content is being re-purposed within the organization. Many professional services organizations implement the concept of a Shopping Cart, where you can park intellectual property relevant to a new project. This enables content owners to dramatically improve personalization of their search experience, and empowers organizations to promote specific pieces of content based on keywords entered in a way similar to an e-commerce site’s recommending products to a shopper.

BA Insight provides all of the key components required to assemble a fully-functional SBA for professional services firms on top of SharePoint and Fast within days or weeks, at a total cost of ownership that is a fraction of the traditional enterprise search vendors. Our SBAs are being widely adopted in other vertical markets such as financial services, life sciences, energy, and government.

What are the benefits to a commercial organization or a government agency when working with your firm?

The main benefits are speed of deployment and price-point for delivering SBAs. And while we can provide value-added professional services to deploy the underlying SharePoint and Fast platform, we typically recommend customers use one of our Microsoft-certified enterprise partners, which are listed on our Web site.

Our partners specialize in, or have dedicated teams who specialize in, SharePoint and Fast implementations, and they have been trained to understand our technology from both a technical and business perspective. Customers also benefit from the fact that we only recommend partners who previously have engaged in successful deployments with us. Our customers, many of whom know how tricky such deployments can get if mishandled, appreciate such validation. We believe that Microsoft enterprise search competency is hard to achieve, and we work with and recommend only the best partners in each market where we do business.

There has been a surge in interest in putting "everything" in a repository and then manipulating the indexes to the information in the repository. On the surface, this seems to be gaining traction because network resident information can "disappear" or become unavailable. What's your view of the repository versus non repository approach to content processing?

We subscribe to the “put everything in a repository” architectural approach for several reasons.

The first reason is linked to the economics of computing resources. The cost of storage has decreased more quickly than the cost of content processing or bandwidth. The net result is that you are better off making a full copy of content and incrementally processing it as you fine-tune the content processing rules, rather than re-crawling the content over the network and re-processing from scratch.

From a governance and compliance standpoint, search and discovery applications are often linked to the requirements of archiving and legal retention, when it comes to email communications, documents, and structured records. The ability to demonstrate that a copy of a record has been made, marked for retention, and cannot be discarded is a key requirement for compliance and legal departments, especially in highly regulated industries.

The third reason we support the “everything in a single repository” approach is because the caching of content enables multi-pass processing of information, incrementally enriching it with new information as it gets processed. The unreliability of external information processing services makes permanent storage of enhanced content a failover mechanism.

Our connector technology has open application programming interfaces (APIs) to push enriched information into the targeted content management systems and data warehouses. Given our go-to-market strategy of running on top of SharePoint, our current hooks feed into the SharePoint and Fast Search indexes, SharePoint lists and libraries, and Office 365, which hosts SharePoint online.

How does your firm see the computing world over the next 2 to 5 years?

We see a big shift from desktop to mobile devices, and the need for search based applications (SBAs) to be device-independent becomes critical, with full support of standard-based visualization formats such as HTML5. There is possibility of lost access if and when the mobile user doesn’t have proper security access to internal networks and applications, or when the mobile device provides a user interface that does not enable sufficient navigation of the surfaced information. Mobile user experience and data visualization are key milestones of our SBA product roadmap over the next 12 months.

What are the three most significant technologies that you see affecting your search business?

I believe that the cloud is the single most important driver of transformation in the enterprise search space, enabling the storage and processing of enterprise information at a fraction of the cost relative to on-premise infrastructure. It also enables a frictionless delivery of SBAs to desktop applications, enterprise portals, and mobile devices.

Mobile search in the consumer space is already happening, even if at the early stage. Location-based recommendation apps are a great example of that. In the enterprise, we will see the explosion of Search Based Applications running on mobile devices, tailored to the increasingly mobile workforce.

Where does a reader get more information about your firm?

The best is to go to our website resources section at http://www.bainsight.com/. In addition to product info found at the website, we constantly provide a large number of expert webinars and free tools to help maximize your SharePoint and Fast Search investment.

ArnoldIT Comment

We look at a large number of SharePoint-centric search solutions, webparts, third- party components, and content tools. Our view is that if you are a SharePoint licensee, you will want to take a close look at the BA Insight products and services.

Stephen E. Arnold, October 11, 2011