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Interview Exclusive: Exalead’s New US Chief Executive Officer

On January 2, 2008, I spoke with Paul Doscher, the newly appointed chief executive officer for Exalead, the Paris-based information access company. I received a preview of Exalead technology in November 2008, and I will summarize some of my impressions in a short white paper on my ArnoldIT.com Web site in the next few days.

The full text of my interview with Mr. Doscher appears below:

Why are you expanding in the US market? What’s your background?

Exalead has seen tremendous growth in Europe over the past few years and unlike some of our competitors, our clients are with us for the long haul. We enjoy 100% customer referenceability in Europe. The US represents a significant growth engine for Exalead and we believe we are in a unique position not just to grow our US business – but to help redefine the information access industry.

I have been in the computer software space for 30 years starting in sales and sales management eventually leading to my most recent role as CEO. I have worked in companies such as Oracle, Business Objects and VMware. Before becoming CEO of Exalead, Inc I was CEO of JasperSoft, the leading open source business intelligence company.

What is the major content processing problem your system solves?

This is a new era in information access. In business, valuable information is increasingly stored in silos – dozens of various locations and data formats – that are hard to retrieve in a way that provides necessary context to the end user. Exalead CloudView has been designed to make sense of the structured and unstructured data found both internally behind the firewall and from external sources. Exalead offers quick-to-implement information access solutions that help workers, partners and customers make better, faster and more accurate business decisions.

What is the basis of your firm’s technical approach?

Exalead provides a highly scalable and manageable information access platform built on open standards. Exalead transforms raw data, whatever its nature, into actionable intelligence through best of breed indexing, extraction and classification technologies.

Can you give me an example of your system in action? You don’t have to mention a company name, but I am interested in what the problem was and what your system delivered to the customer?

Exalead is moving beyond what people generally think of when they think about enterprise search. I’ll give you two examples – one that discusses an innovative use case of searching structured data. The second discusses unstructured data.

First is an example of our dealing with structured data. GEFCO, €3.5 billion company, ranks among Europe’s leading transport and logistics firms. They are using Exalead to track their vehicles. GEFCO’s new “Track and Trace” application is built upon Exalead’s flagship platform that offers powerful search functionality and can provide up-to-the-minute information from an extremely large data set. Integrated into GEFCO’s Internet portal Gefconet, Track and Trace allows GEFCO staff, partners and customers to locate the exact position of vehicles, track their progress and optimize transport schedules in real time.

Second is a project where we search and make sense of unstructured data. Our engineers at Exalead built an unreleased project called Restminer – a site aimed at helping find restaurants in a large city like New York City. What we do here is interesting. Restminer gives the user useful, structured information extracted from the unstructured web including dedicated press, blog posts, restaurant reviews, directories – with relevant tips coming from different sources.

Exalead is French owned company. What’s the customer footprint? As you look forward what is your goal for the footprint in 2009?

At the end of 20008, we have around 190 customers across multiple vertical markets including on-line media/publishing, social networking, the public sector, on-line directories, financial services and telecommunications. We are looking for 50% growth in our customer base in 2009.

The Exalead software was quite solid? What are the benefits your system delivers to a typical enterprise customer? Is it search or another type of solution?

Exalead provides information access and search solutions in basically three market segments: OEM, B2C and B2B.

In the OEM [original equipment manufacturing] market, software companies have realized what a powerful embedded search platform can bring to their own solution. ISVs [independent software vendors] enrich their functional capabilities by introducing new sources of content and more powerful access retrieval into their core applications.

In the B2C space, consumer web sites such as our customer RightMove in the UK are finding that a highly scalable information access solution can save on hardware costs and make their visitor’s experience much better (for www.rightmove.co.uk). Globally, we are seeing sites use our cutting edge semantic mash-up technologies to bring search result from video, audio and text, such as http://virgilio.alice.it/ in Italy.

For our B2B customers, we are seeing companies implement real-time search across multiple data repositories. Any search platform tied to mission critical business applications have to be flexible, scalable and fast. Exalead’s product is used in various mission critical implementations, including track and tracing trucks; operational reporting and large scale document searches.

I recall hearing that your firm has patented technology? Can you provide me with a snapshot of this invention? What’s the patent application number? How many patents does your firm have? What are the key features of the Exalead CloudView system?

Exalead has a significant number of patents granted and pending both in the US and EU relating to the areas of intelligent searching, indexing, keyword extraction and other aspects of the search technology. For example, US Patent 7152064 was issued to Exalead in 2006, providing for improved unified search results – allowing for end users to more easily navigate and refine complex search results.

Our explosive growth continues to drive innovation and functionality into our products – we continue to submit for new patents as our product expands.

In the OEM sector, Autonomy seems to be the giant with its OEM deals with BEA and the Verity OEM deals. Some of the Verity deals date from the late 1980s. How do you see Exalead fitting into this sector?

There is always a place for innovation. We are confident in our capabilities and how they can meet the growing demands of OEMs.

We are beginning to see customers move away from our competitor’s legacy OEM solutions. We provide an easy to implement, scalable and manageable solution. Also, we see growing demand for our simpler licensing model – which makes life much easier for our customers.

Exalead OEM has all the rich features as our other product platforms such as Enterprise Search Edition and the 360 Edition. No matter how huge the volume of information processed by the OEM application, Exalead CloudView provides an easy to implement SOA architecture. OEM customers build applications that search their own system’s content – as well as from any kind of other sources that can be relevant. OEMs can dramatically increase their product functionality and differentiation by adding search of external Web sites, external knowledge bases and building in new hybrid services using our developer kit.

There’s quite a bit of turmoil in search. In fact, the last few weeks Alexa (an Amazon company) closed its web search unit and Lycos Europe (which purchased software from my partner and me in the mid 1990s) said it would close up shop. What’s that mean for Exalead going forward?

Our web search engine is available at www.exalead.com/search. Based on CloudView, it provides Internet users with an innovative way of discovering results and content from the Web’s 8 billion+ pages. Web search has always been a real world lab to test our technologies and user features – some of which, like facial recognition, have been implemented on Exalead well in advance of their use on other major search sites. But, more than this, we consider the Web as a key source of information – competitive intelligence, partner information, customer information, legal documents, external database providers, blogs, etc. There is more and more key information on the web that enterprises need to manage effectively. Exalead Web search is key in the overall Exalead strategy – and the functionality on our Internet search site will continue to drive innovation in our information access platform.

One trend in enterprise content processing is the shift from results lists to answers. Among the companies in this sector are Relegence (a Time Warner company), Connotate (privately held but backed by Goldman Sachs), and Attivio (a company describing itself as delivering active intelligence). Each of these firms is really in the search business but positioning search as “intelligence”. What’s your take on the changing face of search in an organization?

If making information instantly available for decisions is intelligence, we definitely are working in the information intelligence business. Our approach is driven by customer demand for TCO and ROI – we bring real value to businesses looking to make better, faster decisions. For example, at our customer GEFCO, structured data is available in real time for staff and customers so transportation cycles can be adjusted in real time – significantly improving their bottom line.

As the economic crisis depends, we continue to see our partners such as Capgemini, Logica, and Sogeti come up with new, exciting solutions for Exalead CloudView for their customers.

Google has been a disruptive force in search. In one US agency, different Google resellers have placed search appliances, often at $400,000 a unit in a major US government agency. No single person realized that there were more than $6 million worth of devices. As a result, the project to “fix” search means that Google is the default search system. What are the challenges and opportunities Google presents to Exalead? What about the challenges and opportunities Microsoft presents with its strong grip on the desktop and a growing presence in servers?

Ironically, former Google and Microsoft customers fuel much of our sales funnel – so we appreciate and benefit from everyone’s niche in this marketplace.

Google raised end-user expectations about what web search can achieve – it brought a new level of simplicity, relevancy and interactivity. But as we’ve seen as more Google Enterprise Search customers move to Exalead – bringing this functionality to enterprises is a different matter all together.

Google Enterprise Search has technical and functional limits in terms of scalability, security compliance, the ability to search structure and unstructured data and the ability to provide all the necessary context to make a search relevant. Enterprises know that information access means more than a flat list of results – which is driving more companies to look at Exalead.

Microsoft and its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer brought many opportunities to us as well. For example, we’ve seen a growing number of companies who use Linux or other non-Microsoft operating systems look for a new partner instead of Microsoft.

Mobile search is slowly making headway. Some of the push has been because of the iPhone and Google’s report that queries on an iPhone are higher than from users with other brands of smart phones? What does Exalead provide for mobile search?

Exalead is actively working with mobile companies and telcos in a number of ways. We launched an iPhone search www.exalead.com/iphone in Europe. We are also working with mobile companies to help connect mobile devices to PCs and help accelerate access to mobile content. We will announce more of this functionality in 2009.

The economic climate is quite weak. How is Exalead adjusting to this global problem? I have heard that you have built out a US office with more than two dozen people? Is that correct?

We met all of our aggressive sales numbers in 2008 – in large part because our technologies provide our customers a high return on their investment. We unleash new levels of information access and allow better, faster decision-making. So far, it appears the appetite for our offerings is growing in this economic client.

What are the three major trends you see with regards to search and content processing in 2009?

The biggest trend we see in 2009 is that search will become a development platform. Open product platforms like Exalead will become a platform for new, unexpected solutions by 3rd party vendors.

Other big trends in 2009 will be continuation of what we’ve seen over past few years: smarter context around search results and better searching of rich content including audio and video.

Can you hint at what’s coming in 2009 in terms of features in the CloudView system?

The launch of Exalead CloudView 360 later this year will be a game changer for the industry. Exalead CloudView 360 will have functionality that will transform heterogeneous corporate data into contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried – and allow for an explosion of new applications to be built on top of the platform.

Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2008

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