Exclusive Interview: Franz Kogl, Intrafind

July 10, 2012

Germany is a hot house for search, semantic, and content processing vendors. Most of them are not widely known outside of Germany. Intrafind, based in Munich, has been in business for more than a decade. The company is anchored in search solutions. I had heard about Intrafind, but I did not have much first-hand information about the company. In London in June, I spent some time with Franz Kögl and found that the firm has a number of high profile clients and, like a number of other companies, has found success with open source technology.

I asked Mr. Kögl  about his view of search in 2012. He said, “The future every modern application will be ‘search enabled.’”

The company’s approach is refreshing. He told me:

Our approach is, “Think big, start small.” Many of our customers start with an application like an internal search. We then can extend the service piece by piece. For example, a new requirement comes from another department or business unit. It is pretty typical for us to start work in a single department. Then the client decides to use our iFinder as corporate search solution. What is special about our approach is that we combine computer linguistics within information retrieval. It’s not the idea itself which is unique, but the way we have implemented it.

On the subject of big data he said:

Huge amounts of data are frequently discussed at client meetings. We can handle almost any volume of data. We have different methods to match specific client situations. If updating the index is a key consideration, we work with the client to make clear that the update time of the full-text index is largely dependent on the connected sources and the attendant system.

To read the full text of the interview, navigate to “IntraFind AG: An Interview with Franz Kögl.” The ArnoldIT Search Wizards Speak subsite contains more than 60 interviews with professionals in the search and content processing sector. You can find the index to the interviews on the Wizards Index tab. A complete listing also appears on the Search Wizards Speak subsite.

Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2012

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