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Exalead: Moving the Front Line

A happy quack to the reader in California who sent me an update on Exalead. In the last 10 days, I have received a steady flow of news. The company continues to make headway in the US market.

The company has announced CloudView OEM Edition 5.0. This is a version of the product that can be embedded in third- party applications. The product has been designed for independent software vendors and software as a service providers. The OEM edition includes performance improvements with tweaks to make embedding easier and quicker. The product, as I understand it, can be used to add search and sophisticated content processing functions to email, CMS, call center, and other information centric applications.

Paul Doscher, CEO of Exalead said:

As the use of traditional Web and Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, instant messaging, social networking, and collaboration has proliferated within the enterprise, users have come to expect the same simplicity, speed, and scale from their enterprise software providers. The challenge for ISVs is to provide that same experience in their search capabilities without sacrificing the security and precision required for enterprise use. Exalead CloudView OEM Edition helps them deliver on that challenge.

(Note: you can read an exclusive January 2008 Beyond Search interview with Mr. Doscher here.)

Features of the new product include:

• Ability to deal with petabytes of data
• Aggregation, collation, and normalization of data from disparate structured and unstructured sources; for example, HTML, Microsoft Office documents and other files scattered across corporate servers, data located at SaaS providers, active and archived e-mail, relational data, proprietary application data, etc.
• Support for fuzzy and precise relevancy
• Small CPU and disk footprints
• Scalability to handle spikes
• High peak user concurrency
• Support for existing interfaces, security models, and data source
• Multi language support.

In my April 2008 Gilbane Group report Beyond Search I highlighted Exalead’s architectural advantage. Based on my research, Exalead and Google tackle scaling and performance in somewhat similar ways. (Note: the founder of Exalead was a senior AltaVista.com engineer. You can read an interview with François Bourdoncle here.)

CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 uses Exalead’s open, modular architecture. As I pointed out in my Gilbane Group report here, the engineering permits information management vendors to deliver scaling and performance advantages using commodity hardware. Exalead’s scalability and lightweight footprint are achieved through the use of a modularized system architecture that incorporates proprietary methods. The Exalead architecture is based upon research that has been on-going since Exalead’s inception in 2000. These capabilities enable vendors to minimize the hardware requirements for their overall offering and better predict system performance and hardware requirements for customer deployments, maximizing customer satisfaction and reducing support calls.

Exalead CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 supports about 500 terabytes of data per server cluster and more than 100 million documents on a single server. Throughput is 30 million database objects in 10 hours. Email is indexed at the rage of 60 gigabytes of mail data in a single hour. Standard office documents are processed at about 9000 documents per second. CloudView OEM Edition is used within Exalead’s own Web search site here and supports over 100 queries per second (QPS) per server. ArnoldIT.com uses the Exalead system in its Overflight service. You can search more than 70 Google blogs here. The entity extraction functions appear in the right hand column in the screenshot below:

We use the Exalead system to index Google Web log content. The goal is to tap into Exalead’s advanced semantic technologies. The CloudView OEM edition automatically analyzes, categorizes, enhances and aligns structured and unstructured data. The system makes sense of the diverse data in an enterprise. The feedback we have received about CloudView suggests that users are delighted with the accuracy, precision, and relevance of the search results. CloudView OEM delivers these benefits to third party licensees who embed the system to process data from file systems, e-mail archives, or an application databases. The natural language processing modules (lemmatization, dynamic categorization, spell-checking, spell suggestions, etc.) are designed to evolve automatically and in real-time as customers’ data evolve, resulting in improved results with little or no cost of maintenance.

CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 exposes its search, processing indexing, administrative, and operations capabilities through a rich set of standards-based APIs. This enables rapid and easy integration and drastically reduces time-to-market for Exalead’s OEM customers. In addition, the broadest possible support for operating platforms and programming languages and protocols helps to ensure that developers will be able to easily install, configure and use the product in their development, QA, and build / package environments.

According to Sue Feldman, IDC’s head of search and content processing research said:

Exalead’s ability to integrate data and content is of growing   importance in today’s marketplace. For OEM partners,   Exalead has developed a platform that allows for the development of   many new vertically focused applications.

Pricing Model

Exalead is the only OEM information access vendor to provide a flexible pricing model for ISVs and SaaS providers. Recognizing that each OEM has a unique business model, Exalead’s pricing framework is sufficiently flexible to work with the preferred parameters for each OEM such seats, revenue, concurrency / usage, document count, and data size.

Ranjeet Vidwans, Exalead’s vice president of OEM sales, told Beyond Search:

At Exalead we’ve built our reputation by giving enterprise customers unprecedented access to their mission-critical business content.– it’s the most efficient and effective way to search. Now, we are making it easy for ISVs and OEMs to better serve their customers by providing a technology that is simple to integrate into current offerings and that addresses the design challenge of accommodating exploding data in a manner that is cost-effective for them and their end customers.

We’re happy consumers of Exalead technology here at Beyond Search. You can get more information about the company at its products at Exalead.com here.

Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009

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