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Mindbreeze Enterprise Search

Mindbreeze, headquartered in Linz, Austria, has caught the fancy of several of my European readers. The name was familiar to me, but I knew nothing about the company. KMWorld, the outfit who pays me to write a monthly column about the Google identified Mindbreeze Enterprise Search as “trend setting product of 2008.” I thought I was able to keep up to date on trend setting search systems, but Mindbreeze was a new player to me. You can read the news release about this recognition here. The news release–perhaps in the adrenaline rush of receiving the KMWorld award said, “US magazine KMWorld acclaims the ‘hottest’ products of the year.” Mindbreeze’s parent company–Fabasoft–seems to be working to reverse a decline in revenues.

With US search engines singing happy tunes to me, I have heard that several of the vendors are really struggling to “make their numbers.” Mindbreeze, it seems, is chugging along quite happily. Earlier this year, Intellisearch reallocated its resources. When I pinged the Intellisearch offices in San Francisco, I was redirected to the company’s offices in Europe. The flagships in search and content processing remain Autonomy (more of a diversified services vendor) and Exalead (a real challenger to the GOOG in engineering) dominate the European scene. I know there are many specialized vendors–for instance, Polderland in the Netherlands–and the revivified Oslo operation for Microsoft Fast Search & Transfer. I heard on my last trip to Europe of a number of new search and content processing vendors, and I will try to cover these as I get more information.

MES (Mindbreeze Enterprise Search)

Mindbreeze has an office in Beverly, Massachusetts. The US contact is David Cloyd, according to the document I reviewed. The managing director of the main company is Daniel Fallmann, who works from the Linz office. The marketing angle is what the company’s brochure calls CEVA or Content Enable Vertical Application. Here’s a diagram of how this works. The various components refer to software available from other Fabasoft companies.

The components show are a work flow component (Folio), a compliance archive (iArchive), a case management system (DUCX), and an operations manager. In this context, Mindbreeze seems to be heading in the same direction as MarkLogic, but I need to do more digging.

And what about Mindbreeze? (For more details you can download the Mindbreeze product brochure here.)

The company’s Web site provides no information about “latest news” as of October 3, 2008, at 8 30 am Eastern time. I expect that the news about the KMWorld award will be posted at some time in the future. The news archive reported on March 30, 2006 (the most recent entry) that a service pack was available for Mindbreeze Enterprise Search 1.6 was available.  My firth thought was, “No news in two years. Hmmmm.”

I did locate FAQs for Versions 1.6, 2.x, and 3.x. The most interesting items I noted were:

• MES (Mindbreeze Enterprise Search) is available in a 64 bit version
• Graphic tweaks have been implemented in the administrative controls and the user interface
• Support for Fabasoft iArchive Exchange. (Fabasoft is a holding company and the owner of Mindbreeze. The annual turnover of the company is in the US$30 million range. In the firm’s most recent quarterly reports, revenues were drifting downward continuing the trend that surfaced in FY2006.)

A representative MES results list.

Searching

The system supports different relevancy models which are applied to “specific types of queries.” The user enters terms or phrases in a search box. The system then generates what the company calls “guided navigation features”, which will thrill the Endeca team which jealously protects the notion of “guided”. Search results are group by category, type, context so the user gets an overview of the information processed by the system. The system generates preview for every result. This is a feature that I don’t find that useful. MES permits the user to configure the rendering as a full document preview, which can be useful to me. The company says, “Overall  enterprise-wide  ranking  by  different  semantic  language-independent  algorithms are supported.”

Architecture

The system runs on several flavors of Linux and Windows Server. The company says here that:

The Mindbreeze Enterprise Search Grid Architecture is a distributed web service oriented grid architecture that is capable of managing millions of documents in one distributed environment. With just one mid-sized server Mindbreeze Enterprise Search is capable of managing up to millions of documents and indexing speeds of up to 1 TB in less than 15 hours (depending on the underlying hardware infrastructure).

The system can access information on different file systems, process email on Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise, and Web site. MES maintains existing user rights and the application context.Other features of MES include:

• Server and client side indexing
• Full consideration of existing access rights
• Single user interface for content processed by the system
• Server side search via a Web interface
• Unicode Standard conformance (support for Unicode languages and scripts)
• Metadata search (pictures and document files, e-mail)
• Assisted navigation and a facility to drag a result from the hit list.

Mindbreeze supports open standards and offers a software development kit for customization and extension of the system. The tagline for MES is “empower your application.”

The Web client looks like this:

Customers

As I worked through the Web site, I was able to identify two customers, Canton Thurgau in Switzerland and the Salzburg City Council in Austria. As I recall, Mozart did not like Salzburg, but Mindbreeze seems to find it hospitable.

The company lists four partners. I recognized one, Unisys. But the branch of Unisys listed was in Portugol. The other three–Curiavant Internet GmbH, DWC Slovakia, and AKM (also in Austria)–were new to me.

Net Net

A download of the program is available here. I don’t have current pricing information. After we test the system and get a sense of the pricing, I will update this profile. If you have experience with Mindbreeze, use the comments section to update, amplify, or correct the information in this article.

Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2008

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