ISYS’ Ian Davies Interviewed
March 6, 2008
An interview, conducted in February 2008, with Ian Davies, founder of ISYS Search Software, is now available. ISYS — founded in Australia almost 20 years ago. Beyond Search has identified this company as one to watch. Its ready-to-run solution is fast, intuitive, and feature complete.
The company has made strong inroads into law enforcement, litigation support, and competitive intelligence. These are sectors long viewed as the domain of certain publicly-traded search system vendors. ISYS’ success is a result of more than a decade of innovation.
Mr. Davies says in his interview, “We described our early product as an iceberg … the really important bits were never seen. The bit below the water-line was crucial to make the whole thing work… Some of our competitors were ‘all tip and no berg'”.
ISYS lets its system “do the talking.” The key to ISYS’ marketing is the company’s almost obsessive desire to listen and respond to its customers.
I asked Mr. Davies about the marketing hype that swirls through the content processing industry. He laughed and said, “When I attend an industry event and hear the jargon and the buzzwords, I chuckle. ISYS is a search solution that offers features that are useful to a large percentage of users. You don’t need fancy jargon like semantic wiki or enhanced Bayesian algorithms to make a system useful. There needs to be rocket science, without doubt… [Our] system does the talking, not the buzzwords.”
In my testing of ISYS 8.x, I was impressed by the system’s performance. I asked Mr. Davies about ISYS’ speedy indexing and query processing. He told me:
Performance comes in two ways. The first is algorithmic performance, where the algorithms you come up with scale well with volume. It’s all about curves, and it’s key. If your curves are wrong, you’re never going to scale. The second is implementation performance, where there’s craftsmanship in how well you implement your algorithm. We spend a lot of time analyzing our code and profiling to ensure the bottlenecks are eliminated.
According to Mr. Davies, the company is experiencing rapid growth in its offices in Australia, the U.S., and Europe. ISYS is worth a hard look. You can read the full interview here. You can download a trial version here.
Stephen Arnold, March 8, 2008
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Quick update on a couple of ISYS items since this was posted. At the AIIM conference, we announced the availability of Linux versions for our ISYS:web and ISYS:sdk products. Just as Ian mentions in the interview that many of our enhancements are customer driven, our Linux version reflects this as well. We found that our OEM partners as well as our base of customers requiring search for e-discovery needed a multi-platform search solution. So we made it happen. In addition, last week we announced that ISYS was named a CODiE Awards finalist in the Enterprise Search category (we know how much you like that term, Steve).
Good momentum in search right now. On April 1, we’ll take it one step further by announcing our “semantic analytics wiki algorithm.”