Coveo Reports Record Fourth Quarter 2009 Results
February 4, 2010
I learned via the Coveo Web site that the Coveo search and content processing company turned in a strong fourth quarter. I did learn that the company closed 37 deals and closed its Series B round of financing. In addition, the company’s engineers have continued to expand the capabilities of the Coveo platform. Coveo is privately held, and I was not able to get my hands on specific numbers. According the company,
Coveo expanded relationships with existing customers, including CA and GEICO, and added new enterprise clients including one of the world’s largest restaurant companies; Quantum Corp., the leading global specialist in backup, recovery and archive; as well as Trading Technologies, Platt Electrical Supply, Laureate Education, Inc., Grand Circle Travel, and several other leading organizations.
The Coveo team pointed me to a client, John Ragsdale, VP of Technology at Technology Services Industry Association who said:
Tied to no single knowledge base or content management tool, Coveo’s platform does very creative indexing of all enterprise and customer support content (biggest library of packaged connectors I’ve seen) and enables additional attribution or meta data to be associated to the content–sort of sophisticated tagging. With the slickest mashup capabilities I’ve seen–including real time data pulls–they have created dashboards, pulling in and analyzing data from any number of content sources, and showing the results. It is much more than a search engine, or a dashboarding tool, or a reporting platform, though it can do all of these things well. Additionally, by enriching existing content with additional metadata, Coveo can help companies leverage old legacy systems that still serve their purpose but don’t allow much in the way of integration or reporting.
The question becomes, “What’s next?” For more information, navigate to www.coveo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write this article. I am still waiting for the taco promised to me in October 2009 by one of Coveo executives. I will report this misstep to the director of the GSA’s cafeteria in Washington, DC.
Bing to Be a Money Machine
February 4, 2010
A happy quack to the reader in the UK who sent me a link to “Microsoft’s Bing Will Make Money,” a story that appeared in the UK’s Independent newspaper. I thought that Bing.com was an expensive operation and the most recent version of a series of expensive Web search investments that Microsoft has been making for a decade. Whenever I hear about an online service “making money”, I think about the Original Lexis Syndrome; that is, as long as no one goes back to total the amount spent on an online property since its inception, total the actual revenues, and then figure in the interest on the money—it is easy to assert that an online service will “make money”. But accountants have become malleable computational beasts, much like one of my trusted boxer dogs. Enron trained its accountants to play dead and roll over. Do you think other online executives have similar training skill?
In my opinion, the notion of figuring out the actual cost and payoff or loss from an online property is not a particularly high priority. I used to argue about this with Don Wilson, one of the founders of the original Lexis service which Mead Paper bought a quarter century ago. He would remind me that “accounting rules are rules. Real money is different.” Sadly Don Wilson is no longer with us, but I would be quick to point out that making money online is tough. Don would agree that saying that one can make money online is a heck of a lot easier than actually do it and making a healthy, sustainable profit.
The most interesting passage in the write up in the Independent was in my opinion:
The world’s biggest software company has lost more than $5 billion (£3.1 billion) over the past four years trying to build an online business, but hopes to reverse that trend once it completes a search advertising partnership with Yahoo Inc. “As soon as we close and implement the Yahoo deal, we have achieved a milestone: for advertisers, we are a credible No. 2,” Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, said in an interview on Tuesday.
So what’s the interest on this and the total spent in Web search since 2002? When?
I keep thinking about the time and money calculations from some distant college class. Maybe today’s financial wizards don’t look at those numerical recipes? I do, but that’s an addled goose for you.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
No one paid me to write about my college classes in 1962. I will report this to the Department of Education if I can get a human on the phone. Perhaps I should send a text like this: “No pay 4 stry.”
The Wages of SEO
February 4, 2010
A not so happy quack to the reader who sent me a long, long diatribe by SEO guru Daniel Sullivan, father of the mega-search engine optimization conferences. These are held seemingly every few days in every city around the world. Fearful marketing managers and snake oil sales professionals meet and greet in a unbridled mating game. The idea is that a fearful marketing manager with lousy Web traffic will speed date SEO experts, and both will go off to click through bliss. Well, that’s the theory.
Let me give you the cast of characters:
- Daniel Sullivan, search expert, SEO guru, and father of giant, zealot-stuffed conferences
- Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, Google critic and basketball team owner with an investment in Mahalo, IceRocket and other properties
- Jason Calacanis, entrepreneur, business seer, and New Yorker who nurtures Mahalo.com, a conference, and a snazzy electric sports car
- Google. Yes, the Google that is the bane of Rupert Murdoch and other publishing executives obsessed with “real journalism” and pay walls.
My goodness. This line up is like a modern version of a Greek drama. Each character is larger than life itself.
You will want to read “He Calls Google A Vampire, But Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Is Doing The Sucking.” I quite liked the screen shots, the red arrows, and the description of the SEO tricks identified by the master himself. If you have some trouble figuring out who is the bad guy in this analysis, you are with me. The basic idea behind the write up is that a basketball team owner is not happy with Google. The basketball team owner sees Google as a company profiting on the labor of others. The SEO guru is annoyed that the basketball team owner has invested in the New Yorker’s search company that uses the SEO methods taught at the SEO guru’s conferences to generate money.
In the write up, the savvy New Yorker (Brooklyn, in fact) is an alleged villain. The write up explains in great detail the SEO tricks used by the New Yorker to generate money via Google’s monetization programs. Keep in mind that these tactics are part of the warp and woof of the SEO guru’s conferences.
The “vampire” Google wants traffic and, therefore, wants to get as many people clicking within the Google world as possible. Web site owners want to ride the money train too, so Web site owners need SEO. The SEO guru delivers the goods; that is, methods for spoofing Google.
What we have in the write up is a description of the feedback loop that has made Web search less effective over the last three or four years in my experience. I can’t figure out who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Maybe the cast of characters, like Greek mythological figures, are a mix of good and evil, deeply conflicted, and sufficiently confused to make really bad mistakes. Remember Orpheus, Sisyphus, et al?
I know a fix.
Why not log on to a social networking system and post a question. You may have a better chance of getting a useful result just asking people. Search is broken. SEO has played a role. Move on.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 2
February 4, 2010
This is the second part of the interview with Raymond Bentinck of Exalead.
Isn’t this bad marketing?
No. This makes business sense.Traditional search vendors who may claim to have thousands of customers tend to use only a handful of well managed references. This is a direct result of customers choosing technology based on these overblown marketing claims and these claims then driving requirements that the vendor’s consultants struggle to deliver. The customer who is then far from happy with the results, doesn’t do reference calls and ultimately becomes disillusioned with search in general or with the vendor specifically. Either way, they end up moving to an alternative.
I see this all the time with our clients that have replaced their legacy search solution with Exalead. When we started, we were met with much skepticism from clients that we could answer their information retrieval problems. It was only after doing Proof of Concepts and delivering the solutions that they became convinced. Now that our reputation has grown organizations realize that we do not make unsubstantiated claims and do stick by our promises.
What about the shift to hybrid solutions? An appliance or an on premises server, then a cloud component, and maybe some fairy dust thrown in to handle the security issues?
There is a major change that is happening within Information Technology at the moment driven primarily by the demands placed on IT by the business. Businesses want to vastly reduce the operational cost models of IT provision while pushing IT to be far more agile in their support of the business. Against this backdrop, information volumes continue to grow exponentially.
The push towards areas such as virtual servers and cloud computing are aspects of reducing the operational cost models of information technology provision. It is fundamental that software solutions can operate in these environments. It is surprising, however, to find that many traditional search vendors solutions do not even work in a virtual server environment.
Isn’t this approach going to add costs to an Exalead installation?
No, because another aspect of this is that software solutions need to be designed to make the best use of available hardware resources. When Exalead provided a solution to the leading classified ads site Fish4.co.uk, unlike the legacy search solution we replaced, not only were we able to deploy a solution that met and exceeded their requirements but we reduced the cost of search to the business by 250 percent. A large part of this was around the massively reduced hardware costs associated with the solution.
What about making changes and responding quickly? Many search vendors simply impose a six month or nine month cycle on a deployment. The client wants to move quickly, but the vendor cannot work quickly.
Agility is another key factor. In the past, an organization may implement a data warehouse. This would take around 12 to 18 months to deploy and would cost a huge amount in hardware, software and consultancy fees. As part of the deployment the consultants needed to second guess the questions the business would want to ask of the data warehouse and design these into the system. After the 12 to 18 months, the business would start using the data warehouse and then find out they needed to ask different types of questions than were designed into the system. The data warehouse would then go through a phase of redevelopment which would last many more months. The business would evolve… making more changes and the cycle would go on and on.
With Exalead, we are able to deploy the same solution in a couple months but significantly there is no need to second guess the questions that the business would want to ask and design them into the system.
This is the sort of agile solution that businesses have been pushing their IT departments to deliver for years. Businesses that do not provide agile IT solutions will fall behind their competitors and be unable to react quickly enough when the market changes.
One of the large UK search vendors has dozens of niche versions of its product. How can that company keep each of these specialty products up to date and working? Integration is often the big problem, is it not?
The founders of Exalead took two years before starting the company to research what worked in search and why the existing search vendors products were so complex. This research led them to understand that the search products that were on the marketplace at the time all started as quite simple products designed to work on relatively low volumes of information and with very limited functional capabilities. Over the years, new functionality has been added to the solutions to keep abreast of what competitors have offered but because of how the products were originally engineered they have not been clean integrations. They did not start out with this intention but search has evolved in ways never imagined at the time these solutions were originally engineered.
Wasn’t one of the key architects part of the famous AltaVista.com team?
Yes. In fact, both of the founders of Exalead were from this team.
What kind of issues occur with these overly complex products?
As you know, this has caused many issues for both vendors and clients. Changes in one part of the solution can cause unwanted side effects in another part. Trying to track down issues and bugs can take a huge amount of time and expense. This is a major factor as to why we see the legacy search products on the market today that are complex, expensive and take many months if not years to deploy even for simple requirements.
Exalead learned from these lessons when engineering our solution. We have an architecture that is fully object-orientated at the core and follows an SOA architecture. It means that we can swap in and out new modules without messy integrations. We can also take core modules such as connectors to repositories and instead of having to re-write them to meet specific requirements we can override various capabilities in the classes. This means that the majority of the code that has gone through our quality-management systems remains the same. If an issue is identified in the code, it is a simple task to locate the problem and this issue is isolated in one area of the code base. In the past, vendors have had to rewrite core components like connectors to meet customers’ requirements and this has caused huge quality and support issues for both the customer and the vendor.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
The added advantage of this core engineering work means that for Exalead integration is a simple task. For example, building new secure connectors to new repositories can be performed in weeks rather than months. Our engineers can take this time saved to spend on adding new and innovative capabilities into the solution rather than spending time worrying about how to integrate a new function without affecting the 1001 other overlaying functions.
Without this model, legacy vendors have to continually provide point-solutions to problems that tend to be customer-specific leading to a very expensive support headache as core engineering changes take too long and are too hard to deploy.
I heard about a large firm in the US that has invested significant sums in retooling Lucene. The solution has been described on the firm’s Web site, but I don’t see how that engineering cost is offset by the time to market that the fix required. Do you see open source as a problem or a solution?
I do not wake up in the middle of the night worrying about Lucene if that is what you are thinking! I see Lucene in places that have typically large engineering teams to protect or by consultants more interested in making lots of fees through its complex integration. Neither of which adds value to the company in, for example, reducing costs of increasing revenue.
Organizations that are interested in providing cost effective richly functional solutions are in increasing numbers choosing solutions like Exalead. For example, The University of Sunderland wanted to replace their Google Search Appliance with a richer, more functional search tool. They looked at the marketplace and chose Exalead for searching their external site, their internal document repositories plus providing business intelligence solutions over their database applications such as student attendance records. The search on their website was developed in a single day including the integration to their existing user interface and the faceted navigation capabilities. This represented not only an exceptionally quick implementation, far in excess of any other solution on the marketplace today but it also delivered for them the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other vendors and of course open-source.
In my opinion, Lucene and other open-source offerings can offer a solution for some organizations but many jump on this bandwagon without fully appreciating the differences between the open source solution and the commercially available solutions either in terms of capability or total cost. It is assumed, wrongly in many instances, that the total cost of ownership for open source must be lower than the commercially available solutions. I would suggest that all too often, open source search is adopted by those who believe the consultants who say that search is a simple commodity problem.
What about the commercial enterprise that has had several search systems and none of them capable of delivering satisfactory solutions? What’s the cause of this? The vendors? The client’s approach?
I think the problem lies more with the vendors of the legacy search solutions than with the clients. Vendors have believed their own marketing messages and when customers are unsatisfied with the results have tended to blame the customers not understanding how to deploy the product correctly or in some cases, the third-party or system integrator responsible for the deployment.
One client of ours told me recently that with our solution they were able to deliver in a couple months what they failed to do with another leading search solution for seven years. This is pretty much the experience of every customer where we have replaced an existing search solution. In fact, every organization that I have worked with that has performed an in-depth analysis and comparison of our technology against any search solution has chosen Exalead.
In many ways, I see our solution as not only delivering on our promises but also delivering on the marketing messages that our competitors have been promoting for years but failing to deliver in reality.
So where does Exalead fit? The last demo I received showed me search working within a very large, global business process. The information just appeared? Is this where search is heading?
In the year 2000, and every year since, a CEO of one of the leading legacy search vendors made a claim that every major organization would be using their brand of meaning based search technology within two years.
I will not be as bold as him but it is my belief that in less than five years time the majority of organizations will be using search based applications in mission critical applications.
For too long software vendors have been trying to convince organizations, for example, that it was not possible to deploy mission critical solutions such as customer 360 degree customer view, Master Data Management, Data Warehousing or business intelligence solutions in a couple months, with no user training, with with up-to-the-minute information, with user friendly interfaces, with a low cost per query covering millions or billions of records of information.
With Exalead this is possible and we have proven it in some of the world’s largest companies.
How does this change the present understanding of search, which in my opinion is often quite shallow?
Two things are required to change the status quo.
Firstly, a disruptive technology is required that can deliver on these requirements and secondly businesses need to demand new methods of meeting ever greater business requirements on information.
Today I see both these things in place. Exalead has proven that our solutions can meet the most demanding of mission critical requirements in an agile way and now IT departments are realizing that they cannot support their businesses moving forward by using traditional technologies.
What do you see as the trends in enterprise search for 2010?
Last year was a turning point around Search Based Applications. With the world-wide economy in recession, many companies have put projects on hold until things were looking better. With economies still looking rather weak but projects not being able to be left on ice for ever, they are starting to question the value of utilizing expensive, time consuming and rigid technologies to deliver these projects.
Search is a game changing technology that can deliver more innovative, agile and cheaper solutions than using traditional technologies. Exalead is there to deliver on this promise.
Search, a commodity solution? No.
Editor’s note: You can learn more about Exalead’s search enable applications technology and method at the Exalead Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
I wrote this post without any compensation. However, Mr. Bentinck, who lives in a far off land, offered to buy me haggis, and I refused this tasty bribe. Ah, lungs! I will report the lack of payment to the National Institutes of Health, an outfit concerned about alveoli.
Overflight Adds Social Media Sites
February 3, 2010
Short honk: We use our Overflight intelligence service to track firms which interest us. We have added three companies to our public version of Overflight. These are Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and LinkedIn.com. We visit the Overflight service when we are updating our files for a company. Remember that Overflight provides a searchable index of the Google Web logs with content processing by the Exalead team in Paris. You can scan Google’s most recent blog postings, obtain information about selected vendors in search and content processing, and now catch up on what’s new with three social media vendors. We will be adding additional information to the service that is now live. The service is available without charge, although commercial versions of this service are available. For more information write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
This is a shameless marketing article. I disclose that I paid myself for the work by eating at Arby’s today.
Google Content Engine Adds Functions
February 3, 2010
The technical gizmos within Google are less exciting that Android tablets, China, and dust ups in Europe. I want to document that the Google received a patent for its invention of a system and method for “Automatic completion of Fragments of Text.” You can read US7657423 at the USPTO’s fine Web site. The inventors are a couple of real wizards. If you have read my Google Version 2.0, you will recognize the names of Simon Tong and Georges Harik. Here’s the abstract for the patent filed in January 2007 and awarded on February 2, 2010:
A system offers potential completions for fragments of text. The system may obtain a text fragment and identify documents that include the text fragment. The system may locate sentences within the documents that include at least a portion of the text fragment, identify sentence endings associated with the located sentences, and present the sentence endings as potential completions for the text fragment.
This is one of Google’s fill in the blanks methods. These are quite important when assembling meaningful chunks of content or locating missing pieces of information when a source has a gap. The method can be applied to other operations as well. Considered in conjunction with Google’s disambiguation and dataspace methods, the invention is an important one in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to point out that this open source document contains useful information about Google’s plumbing. I will report this lack of payment to the subcontractor who handles janitorial duties at the New Executive Office Building. “Janitors” are really an important Google innovation as well. Just think about Dilbert’s janitor.
Exegy Delivers Ultra High Performance Hosted Service
February 3, 2010
With the buzz about real time content processing and outfits like Thomson Reuters delivering really fast throughput, I was not surprised to read in Wall Street & Technology that Exegy has gunned its engine and driven into the low latency hosted content processing service business. “Exegy Deploys Ultra Low Latency Ticket Plant on Options PIPE Platform” reports that Exegy has teamed with Options IT to make its Ticket Plant available on the Options IT platform. If you are not familiar with these firms, both support customers who require low latency access to information. The article said:
The Option PIPE platform is a fully optimized and managed, software-vendor-neutral, global technology infrastructure, providing clients with the efficiencies of a hosted technology service delivered with the scalability, strength and security of an enterprise solution. The hosted Exegy Ticker Plant is the first hardware-accelerated market data appliance built from the ground up to ensure high-frequency traders continuously have the best view of the electronic markets.
Exegy has engineered its hardware, firmware, and software to chop latency from content processing. For more information about Exegy navigate to http://www.exegy.com. For information about Options IT, point your browser to http://www.options-it.com/.
In a drag race, which vendor would win? I would lean toward the Exegy teams. Serious invention from that crowd in my opinion. I described Exegy in a a couple of my studies of next generation content processing vendors because the company distinguished itself with low latency crunching for the Wall Street crowd that has been thinned along with me in the economic melt down.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write this short article. I will report non payment to the IRS who cares about me. No, it really cares. For me. For you. For everyone.
An Attensity About Face?
February 3, 2010
Update, February 3, 2010, 9 pm Eastern. A person suggested that this administrative move is designed to get around one or more procurement guidelines. Sounds reasonable but if the marketing push were ringing the cash register, would such a shift be necessary?–Stephen E Arnold
I learned that the Attensity Group has set up a business unit to sell to the Federal government. I thought Attensity’s roots were in selling to the Federal government and that the company’s diversification into marketing was a way to break free of the stereotypical vendor dependent on US government projects. Guess I was wrong again.
A reader sent me a link to this January 28, 2010, news release “Attensity Government Systems Launches as a Wholly Owned US Subsidiary of Attensity Group.” I noted this passage in the news release:
AGS offers a unique combination of the world’s leading semantic technologies: Attensity Group’s full offering of semantic engines and applications along with Inxight technologies from SAP BusinessObjects. Government agencies can now leverage — for the first time – the powerful capabilities enabled by the combination of Inxight’s multi-lingual advanced entity and event extraction with that of Attensity Group’s patented Exhaustive Extraction. Exhaustive Extraction automatically identifies and transforms the facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots in unstructured text into structured, actionable intelligence and then connects it back to entities – people, places and things. This new combined solution provides researchers with the deepest and broadest capabilities for identifying issues hidden in mountains of unstructured data — inside emails, letters, social media sites, passenger manifests, websites, and more.
In my experience, this is a hybrid play. Along with consulting and engineering services, Attensity will make its proprietary solutions available.
According Attensity, AGS, short for Attensity Government Systems, will:
provides semantic technologies and software applications that enable government agencies to quickly find, understand, and use information trapped in unstructured text to drive critical decision-making. AGS solutions pre-integrate nouns (entities) together with verbs, combining leading semantic technologies, such as Inxight ThingFinder, with Attensity’s unique exhaustive extraction and other semantic language capabilities. This creates a unique capability to see important relationships, create link analysis charts, easily integrate with other software packages, and connect the dots in near real-time when time is of the essence. The comprehensive suite of commercial off-the-shelf applications includes intelligence analysis, social media monitoring, voice of the citizen, automated communications response and routing, and the industry’s most extensive suite of semantic extraction technologies. With installations in intelligence, defense and civilian agencies, Attensity enables organizations to better track trends, identify patterns, detect anomalies, reduce threats, and seize opportunities faster.
I did a quick check of my files on Inxight. A similar functionality may be part of the Powerset technology that acquired acquired. My hunch is that Attensity wants to go after government contracts with a broader offering than its own deep extraction technology. The play makes sense, but I wonder if it will confuse the ad execs who use Attensity technology for quite different purposes than some US government agencies.
Will Attensity be a front runner in this about face, or will the company build out other specialized business units? I can see a customer support unit coming from a vendor, maybe Attensity, maybe not? The bottom line is that search and content processing vendors are scrambling in order to avoid what some business school egg heads call “commoditization.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write about vendors selling to the US government. I will report this to the US government, maybe the GAO just to show that I am intrinsically responsible.
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 1
February 3, 2010
Editor’s introduction: Raymond Bentinck (who now works at Exalead) and I have discussed—maybe argued about–search and content processing every month or so for several years. He has deep experience in enterprise software, including stints at Verity, IBM and Oracle.
Our chosen field of intellectual combat for this conversation was a restaurant in Florida. On January 26, 2010, he and I engaged in a discussion of the woes that one-size-fit-all search vendors now face. In Europe, some customers want a single company like SAP to provide a full service solution. But SAP has met strong financial resistance due to the costs of this type of approach. In North America, some pundits have pointed out that the explosion of vendors offering bargain basement eDiscovery and customer support versions of their search and content processing technology represent the a new frontier in search. Other consultants tout the open source search solutions. Still others push appliances or search toasters. The text of our most recent discussion appears below:
Raymond, have you been keeping up with the consultants who are pointing out that search is now the equivalent of a discount store like Wal*Mart or Tesco?
I’ve kept abreast of consultants that say that search is a commodity with some amusement. If you think of search as being the ability to search over a companies Intranet without any security requirements and simply bring back some results with no context to the user’s query then they could be right.
But no sensible consultant would ever describe, being able to provide query and precise results over billions of up-to-the minute records including the ability to analyze the effectiveness of a companies mission critical operations as commodity.
Right, what I call azure chip consultants.
That’s a telling phrase. I think consultants often confuse the clients. This adds to the complexity of the decision process in my opinion.
But let me jump back to this point: Exalead is delivering information solutions for our customers today. The solution uses sophisticated data and content processing methods. Exalead’s approach demonstrates just how far search has progressed in the past few years. I think that the Exalead approach delivers the business intelligence layer to perform analytics on how to improve business moving forward, increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and improve margins.
Isn’t Exalead moving beyond traditional search and retrieval?
Yes and no. If you think of search as retrieval of information, on this basic level is does not really matter whether this data are structured or unstructured. In fact, even at Verity we delivered embryonic solutions around CRM for financial services or conflict checking in legal. However, the legacy search engines, in my opinion, are not capable of delivering solutions for the mainstream because of their lack of functionality and their complexity. Exalead is a new generation of solution that has been designed from the ground up to deliver these capabilities. These sort of mission critical business applications go under the heading of what I call Search Based Applications.
Can you give me an example of a search enabled application?
Certainly. One of Exalead’s clients, for example, replaced a traditional solution provided by Business Objects / SAP and Oracle. There were significant savings in license fees because this customer no longer needed the aging Business Objects system. Other savings resulted from trimming the number of Oracle licenses needed to run the older business intelligence system. The Exalead solution is now used by thousands more users who require no training. Exalead also slashed the latency in the system response time by a factor of 100. A query that once took 60 seconds to process and display, now processes in less than a second on a fully utilized hardware infrastructure. In addition, our solution delivered more functionality, halved the production costs, but importantly queries the up-to-the-minute data, not data that were hours or days out of date.
Are you saying that the commodity or open source solutions lack the engineering fire power of the Exalead system?
Yes. Even in traditional enterprise search type solutions, I do not see the word “commodity” used by our clients. Let me give you another example. You seem skeptical.
No, I am not skeptical. I saw a demonstration of the new Exalead system in December 2009, and I was impressed with the low latency and the way in which the system delivered answers, not a list of results.
Right. One of our recent new clients has a user base world-wide in excess of a hundred and fifty thousand and uses search over most of this global firm’s content repositories. The firm is now replacing its legacy enterprise search product, Verity K2.
Wow, Verity dates from the mid to late 1980s. I did not know that big name outfits were still using this technology. Can you give me some details?
I can tell you that this Exalead client was previously a flagship implementation for Verity for many years. This client is swapping out Autonomy / Verity for Exalead because the aging search solution was exceptionally hard to manage. In addition, the aging system was expensive to customize. The client’s engineers could not see how to utilize it to meet new and demanding information retrieval requirements moving forward. A final problem was the time required to fiddle with the Autonomy / Verity system to get it to deliver what the users needed. The long development times created staff frustration.
After several months of intense technical evaluations around the World with all the leading search vendors they chose Exalead. I do not think that they would have undertaken this expensive and time consuming exercise if they thought that search was a commodity problem.
I saw a demonstration of Exalead’s indexing method for video. Is that in production now?
Yes. Exalead has made a demonstration available on our Labs’s site at http://voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com/ .
This solution indexes radio and video news from around the world in several languages. In addition to this, we extract in real-time relevant entities from the news items such as people, organizations and locations.
We offer what I call New Media search solutions, Exalead is demonstrating with customers such as Rightmove in the UK that we are able to provide next generation information management solutions. When I say “next generation” I mean that Exalead delivers advantageous semantic capabilities and operational benefits. Even after doing this, the Exalead solution reduced costs by 80 percent.
There is a revolution going on around search which has led well informed and respected analysts such as Sue Feldman from IDC to state that: “The next generation of information work will be search based.” You know Sue don’t you?
Yes, I have worked with her and also done some work for her at IDC.
In my opinion, the consultants who still state that search is a commodity are out of touch with what is gaining traction in savvy firms. Exalead has had a record year, and our growth in the midst of the economic downturn has been stronger than in previous years.
In your opinion, why are some consultants ignoring the search-based application revolution?
I think this is one of your key points. Many of the people advising enterprises about search lack the hands-on experience to know what the pitfalls are that will create problems for some of the traditional solutions. Let’s face it. Many of the flagship systems date from the mid 1990s. Exalead is a newer code base, and it was engineered to scale, be agile, and be easy to integrate with existing enterprise systems.
Can you expand on this idea? I am not sure we are on the same page?
Sure, we recently attended a business intelligence and data warehouse conference. all the traditional business intelligence vendors were there. Putting search in BI is a very hot topic within organizations at the moment.
In reality organizations want business intelligence solutions that a professional can use with no user training. Users want to be presented with data in a way that makes sense for them. Few want to do huge amounts of design work upfront that second guesses the questions that users want to ask. Traditional BI systems are not agile. As a result, when the business changes, an ever expanding army of programmers is required to re-engineer the solution. The idea is to deploy a system in weeks or months, not months or years. BI systems have to be able to extract structured data from unstructured content in order to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. BI systems have to be flexible in order to meet the needs of a user. BI systems have to be able to work with ever growing volumes of data. Stale data is just not acceptable which means the systems must be able to process new data quickly.
How much BI experience have you tallied?
I have worked in business intelligence for many years. What struck me at this conference was how little the messaging of the traditional vendors has changed and more importantly how ill suited they are to meet the above requirements. The limitations that organizations face around business intelligence are driven not by the limitations of the companies vision but more by the limitations of traditional technologies. In a world where it is a challenge for many organizations to meet simple requirements around query and reporting against operational data without huge investments you know that there are major issues with traditional technologies. The ability to meet these and many more requirements is Exalead’s advantage in business intelligence.
What’s your view of this trend that a customer can buy a one size fits all or a very narrow solution from the same vendor?
A customer can buy a one size fits all solution but only if the vendor has a one size fits all product. An appliance is not a one size fits all solution. The appliance becomes a spider in the center of a Web of customized code. An open source search solution is a box of components, a bit like the old Fast Search & Transfer technology. The licensee either assembles the solution or pays a lot of money for engineers to build the solution.
Don’t some vendors let marketing promise the world and then hope the engineers can code what’s just been sold?
Absolutely.
Some vendors have solutions that were designed to be easy to deploy for simple needs but customers hit the wall when they start to expand their requirements or push the product into other areas. Other vendors have more advanced capabilities but they take a huge amount of resources to deploy and lots of difficult customization, often with limited success. These more complex solutions tend not to be widely implemented outside of the core initial requirement.
At Exalead, it is striking how usage of an Exalead-enabled solution jumps. Many traditional information systems seem to turn off large segments of the user population in an organization.
What’s the angle for Exalead?
Our platform is unique in having the same core platform that works on a single laptop for desktop search that scales to millions of users and billions of documents on, for example, our showcase Web search site, by new media companies to provide next generation search based applications, by organizations to provide internal and external search and in ever increasing numbers by organizations to allow them to build agile solutions to retrieve mission critical data from operational databases through to business intelligence, data Warehouses and master data management.
I disagree. How can a single vendor handle the rigors of a foreign language search system with a system that lacks the technical support to deliver on what the marketing folks promise?
One of the frustrating things when I worked for some software vendors was that some prospective clients could not believe whether a capability in the product was reality or just an overblown marketing claim. Some vendors have and still make some unbelievable claims around the capabilities of their products. As people’s knowledge has not been as great around search as say traditional databases or business intelligence solutions, these claims have too often been taken on face value by customers and some analysts.
Why should I believe Exalead?
First, you know me, and you know that I focus on demonstrable evidence of the capabilities of a system.
Second, one of the refreshing things about Exalead is that our marketing is very conservative. Our marketing team never claims something that has not either come from an actual customer’s implementation or been passed directly by our engineers as a capability that the solution can and does deliver. It seems quite obvious but this is not how many marketing departments operate in the industry which has in the past been dominated by “snake-oil” marketing.
This doesn’t of course mean that we promise to deliver less than our competitors. It simply means that we have the proven technology to match our promises.
This is the end of Part 1 of the interview with Mr. Bentinck, Exalead. Part 2 appears on February 5, 2010.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
I wrote this post without any compensation. However, Mr. Bentinck, who lives in a far off land, offered to buy me haggis, and I refused this tasty bribe. Ah, lungs! I will report the lack of payment to the National Institutes of Health, an outfit concerned about alveoli.
Google Has a Facebook Problem
February 2, 2010
I read “Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)” and was surprised. I knew that Facebook had a truckload of rich media, millions of users, and the love of older women. But I did not think about Facebook as a news reader. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Last week, Facebook’s Malorie Lucich posted to the company blog encouraging users set up their Facebook accounts for news reading. Lucich suggested becoming a “fan” of news organizations that publish to Facebook, then adding those connections to a dedicated “list” that only displays updates from news sources. You can subscribe that way to ReadWriteWeb here for example, to the New York Times, to the Environmental Justice Foundation or to thousands upon thousands of other organizations that publish regularly, usually with RSS under the hood.
I am not going to speculate on what Facebook could do. What’s clear to me is that Google has a Facebook problem. Google’s agility has not been sufficiently nimble to deal with the explosion of interest in social centric systems. Period.
Until Google begins acting like the pre-2006 Google, Facebook.com has a chance to become the new Google. This makes Google the “old” Microsoft. Microsoft and IBM become part of the original Burroughs-GE computer and software world. Fighting world battles on many fronts did not work for Rome, and it won’t work for Google.
Facebook is fighting in a way that reminds me of Google of yore. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 2, 2010
No one paid me to write about history. I suppose I should report this to someone at the National Archives, which is in the arms of XML love as Facebook is with its admirers.
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
