Vivisimo’s Founders Interviewed: Raul Valdes-Perez and Jerome Pesenti
March 21, 2008
In mid-March, Vivisimo received an infusion of $4 million from North Atlantic Capital. Vivisimo has emerged as a full-scale “behind the firewall” search provider. The company landed the high-profile search-and-retrieval deal with the US Federal government for USA.gov, the public-facing portal for government information. Then, the company inked a deal with Interwoven, the content management company, to provide search and content processing system for the Interwoven CMS system.
Some pundits see Vivisimo as specialist vendor. That view of the company is incorrect. My sources tell me that Vivisimo is finding itself invited to bid on a range of commercial, government, and association projects. Executives at some well-known, high-profile search firms have asked me about Vivisimo. In my experience, this means Vivisimo is doing something right.
When I heard about the investment, I wanted to learn from Raul Valdes-Perez and Jerome Pesenti, the founders of the company, more about their plans, technology, and views on the industry. Neither of these wizards chases the spotlight, and I had to work to get them to talk.
One of the most interesting points made in our lengthy conversation was that Vivisimo’s “Velocity” platform has two key differentiators in a crowded, often-confusing market. Vivisimo said:
The Velocity platform has major differentiators. One is its great flexibility and adaptability for complex information technology environments and the second is the user experience, the person doing the search. The first point – flexibility and adaptability – is critical for the success of ambitious search deployments. A search engine needs to interact with a very large number of information and enterprise systems, has tremendous scaling requirements, and may need to adapt its workflow or relevance to particular data structures or user needs. Unlike many of our competitors, we pay great attention to the configurability and deployability of our system.
Vivisimo offers a Web search system called Clusty.com. One of its most useful features is on-the-fly clustering of results. Taxonomies are a hot concept in search. Vivisimo explains its approach to clustering “without any pre processing.” Vivisimo adds:
Velocity clustering builds the folders on the fly, without any pre-processing, achieving the same end-user benefit, but without the costs and headaches of taxonomy building. Except in rigid examples like eCommerce search, I actually think that taxonomies don’t help end users much. I don’t hear much about taxonomies anymore, but when they were more in fashion, I used the example of searching for Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh’s old combined baseball/football stadium, which was imploded and replaced with two spanking new sports fields. Search results reporting on the implosion would turn up in a Construction Industry folder in Northern Light, whereas clustering would form a crisp, informative folder called Implosion, which would not be found in anybody’s world taxonomy. The same query on our system put the “implosion” folder with pertinent results in our clustering display.
You can read the complete interview with Messrs. Valdes-Perez and Pesenti on the Search Wizards Speak pages at ArnoldIT.com. (I want to let you know that my son, Erik S. Arnold, worked at Vivisimo for two years, concentrating on Vivisimo’s work in the US government.)
Stephen Arnold, March 24, 2008
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