Autonomy’s Lynch: Governance Market
January 25, 2009
I have been confused by the words used by search wizards to describe what their systems do. As each wave of search and content processing technology crashes against the corporate beach head, the buyers surf, watch, or flee. The waves recede and after a while another wave builds and heads towards the beach head. An endless cycle think I. Governance, short for risk, is now an official buzzword.
CIO Magazine (UK version) ran an interview with Sir Michael Lynch, senior wizard at Autonomy, the Cambridge-based information systems company. I have praised Autonomy for two core attributes that other vendors cannot quite duplicate. First, a sense of what the market wants to buy or hear. Second, the ability to close deals in business sectors where other competitors have either failed or have a smaller presence. Perhaps it is drinking the water of the River Cam? Whatever the reason, Autonomy has been outflanking outfits like the scrutinized Fast Search & Transfer, dozens of newcomers, and some high-profile players like Endeca.
In Martin Veitch’s interview with Sir Michael here, I noticed several interesting comments. Let me highlight two so you have to read the original and not rely upon me as your Kentucky intellect (heaven help you!).
Point one: content management is a discipline that’s going to change. Autonomy, I opine, wants to lead the charge. Interwoven provides the helmet and the lance. Autonomy provides the knights, the battle gear, and the charger named IDOL. CMS has been one of those quasi software inventions that start out small and then multiply like gerbils. You have lots of gerbils, but they are not too useful in my opinion. Then the CMS consultants–almost always members of the trophy generation who think of content as a Web page–run up their bills. Autonomy, as I understand Sir Michael, wants to gallop into the CMS vendors and clear the field.
Point two: worries about multiple products and services that do similar functions are not the issue. The focus is on growing revenue. Autonomy will pick its friends and then makes sales. Over time, the duplication of products and services will sort themselves out. That strategy seems to have worked with IDOL and Verity’s K2.
The more interesting question to me is, “Which search and content processing vendor will challenge Autonomy in this new sector?” Any suggestions?
Stephen Arnold, January 25, 2009
Clearwell Systems: Going Mobile
January 22, 2009
Clearwell Systems will be adding new processing and management capabilities to its updated E-Discovery Platform. It will be announced at LegalTech NY on February 2, 2009. The “Mobile Clearwell” appliance will help companies at the enterprise level deal with varied legal, regulatory and investigative matters with a single search application. The changes are targeting litigation between foreign countries where laws and statues obviously differ. An e-mail from the PR firm handling the announcement said the platform “regulates the ‘processing’ of personal data, and the ‘transport’ or ‘export’ of data outside of the EU.” Read that as “keeps track of anything anyone does to search or organize e-mail or electronic documents.” As we all know, paper trails are very important to lawyers. The E-Discovery platform and new drop-in appliance are web-based, quick to install, and changes are reportedly streamlined to ensure compliance with those pesky rules governing legal action. Therefore, “Mobile Clearwell” can go to the (paper) mountain along with Mohammad. Keep an eye out here for the official announcement next month.
Jessica W. Bratcher, January 21, 2009
Kazeon Chops eDiscovery Prices
January 21, 2009
You know that the white shoe world of legal eagles is preparing for a tough year when eDiscovery outfits cut their prices. Lawyers once spent like mad in the name of due diligence and maybe a little thought about billing. The clients would pay and pay and pay. After all, who wants to wear an orange jumpsuit on the TV news or be immortalized on a Web site marching off to court? Law firm customers — sorry, clients, a more upscale word — are pushing back. Big companies are taking some of the work back inside the company’s walls. The outputs go to law firms who will keeps costs within certain parameters (a fancy word to describe a budget). How do I know these changes are underway? Easy. I got a briefing from an eDiscovery vendor last week and that outfit told me that it was making headway against high end eDiscovery vendors. The issue was cost. Price seemed to be this company’s strategic weapon. Today (January 20, 2009) I read in Byte and Switch here that “Kazeon Cuts Costs of Entry Level eDiscovery”. Paul Travis reports that a company can jump into eDiscovery for as little as $10,000. Keep in mind that a perpetual license still costs $80,000 a year. For me, the most important comment in the article was:
…There are more than 100 e-discovery vendors and that more are expected to enter the market this year. The result has been customer confusion and “led to a customer demand for clarity around e-discovery products, and for full integration around the e-discovery workflow process.
With the LegalTech trade show looming, I expect more cost cutting announcements. I am assuming that the show takes place. Rumor has it that one Gartner content management show has been postponed (a big word for shut down). Cost is on a number of professionals’ radar and the pricing for eDiscovery systems will be one indicator of the robustness of the content processing services sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 21, 2009
More Legal Clarity about Metadata
January 17, 2009
IDM.net published Greg McNevin’s “US Court Rules on eDiscovery Metadata.” You can read the story here. You probably don’t think too much about eDiscovery until you find yourself in a trial. Then you develop a real enthusiasm for the activity. Get it wrong and you will have some interesting roomies for a while. Get it right and you never forget about eDiscovery, ever.
The story grinds through a court ruling. The net net is that companies have to do a better job with electronic information. If an organization thinks a data dump will do the job, that’s probably a bad thought. The article stated:
Guidance says that as eDiscovery best practices are delineated and ultimately determined by the courts, this case is particularly important as it dispels any uncertainty concerning the legal requirements for metadata preservation.
Stated another way: index emails, keep the archive from spoliation, and provide the court with whatever the court wants.
Stephen Arnold, January 17, 2009
Symantec Taps Autonomy
January 14, 2009
Autonomy landed another big deal, according to this Reuters’ item at TradingMarkets.com and at Forbes.com. This time Autonomy beat out a number of search and content processing vendors at the security and information management outfit, Symantec. The company owns the Norton Antivirus product, but it has been pushing into the enterprise with acquisitions and internal development. Details are sketchy, but it looks to me that Symantec will use the Autonomy system to process content stored in its enterprise back up, email, and repository systems. Information about Symantec’s full range of products and services is located here. The company’s Enterprise Vault 8.0 product is in need of a search and retrieval system. Autonomy is a player in the enterprise data management sector as well. Autonomy acquired several firms that have provided a client base and upsell opportunities. One example is Autonomy Zantaz, a company that is well known in the email and eDiscovery sector. Symantec is a $6.0 billion a year company; Autonomy is considerably smaller. However, Symantec faces significant challenges, including increased competition in the consumer sector. Enterprise data management is emerging as an increasingly important market sector. Will the Autonomy technology provide the boost that Symantec needs to maintain its growth and profit margins in these tough financial times? I think that data management requires more than search. Google, in my opinion, is one of a handful of companies with the “as is” technology necessary to handle petascale email flows, low-cost scaling, and content processing options. Symantec may have to look beyond today’s competitors and start thinking about the implications of an aggressive move by Google into this sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Exalead Profile Now Available
January 14, 2009
The Enterprise Search Report is no more. Thank goodness. A good idea in 2003 when work on the first edition began, the tome became an antique. I wrote the first three editions. I don’t know who did the fourth. With the coming of the new year, the rights to the information in the Enterprise Search Reports, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions, came back to me. I will be creating profiles based on my research into more than 50 vendors. At its peak the ESR only contained 30 profiles.
The first profile in the new, free Beyond Search Report series–an analysis of Exalead–is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. It runs about 11 pages and includes information about Exalead’s search system. I have enough information for a supplement about Exalead’s newest technology, and I will try to get that posted in the next couple of weeks as well.
I will work through my files and publish a profile every week or two. I have not worked out the full publication schedule yet, but I will get that done once I become more familiar with the new format.
There is no charge for these analyses. If you find an error, or if there is something in a profile with which you don’t agree–use the comments section of this Web log to provide your ideas and facts. I try to deliver a zero error document, but I have been writing about companies for a long time. Changes occur frequently, so you may find some variance between what’s in my free report and what the company’s sales rep tells you tomorrow.
The new logo. The Beyond Search goose is a proud mommy. Tess, however, was annoyed. She wanted a canine to identify these free reports.
Keep in mind that some of the information I have about vendors will not appear in the profiles. If you want more information about a vendor, you can write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and ask for a price quote for a more detailed report. I try to track down pricing and patent information, for example, but I don’t put this information in these free profiles. I want to be helpful, but I don’t want to end up as a Wal*Mart greeter. I have to sell some proprietary reports to survive.
Part of my method is to give the vendor an opportunity to comment on my analyses. These profiles are objective, so a vendor may not agree with some of my points. That’s okay. I just don’t want to be sued by 20 somethings who take umbrage at a 65 year old’s view of a search or content processing company. What vendors say and what the software does are two very different things in my opinion.
The combination of the interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series plus this Web log plus the Beyond Search profiles with a nifty new logo makes it easy for a person interested in enterprise search to get smart without spending $1,000 or more for a report that is outdated the minute it becomes available.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Yet Another Magic Quadrant. Sigh.
January 13, 2009
The notion of a magic quadrant originated with the Boston Consulting Group. The original notion was to depict products in a strategic concept. In the 1970s, BCG caught Booz, Allen & Hamilton (the pre break up version of this blue chip firm) was in a tizzy because the BCG people had a secret weapon that left our consultants looking out of touch. The secret weapon depicted an X and Y axis. The X axis showed market share and the Y axis the growth rate of the business. The idea was to group a firm’s products, technologies, people, or whatever the BCG consultant needed to categorize as a cash cow (complete with a cow picture), stars, dogs, and problems or questions. The client could see what to “milk” and what to shut down. The BCG team would analyze further but the BCG matrix was a good business use of stuff that every calculus student learns in the second day of class. BCG, like other blue chip firms, crunches numbers until those numbers howl for mercy. The analysis sits underneath the matrix. The brilliance of the BCG approach is that it allowed BCG to explain a strategy without having to show slide after slide of analysis; for example:
- Dog–Low market share, low market growth. Example: Search utilities like Outside In
- Cash cows–High market shares, low market growth. Example: IBM OmniFind
- Stars-High market share, high market growth. Example: Google Search Appliance
- Problems or question marks–Low market share, high market growth.Microsoft Live.com search.
Others jumped on the bandwagon. I don’t recall the Booz, Allen & Hamilton buzzword for its strategic map. I have a copy around here somewhere. My recollection is that the McKinsey version of the BCG matrix was that McKinsey had six cells, not four. I always thought of the children created from the BCG quadrant as the BCG matrix. Sloppy thinking, I know. But BCG’s Bruce Henderson was identified to me as the “evil genius” who put Booz, Allen and other blue chip consulting firms behind the eight ball for a period in the 1970s.
When I started paying attention to search and retrieval, an uninformed senior executive whom I am loath to identify, gave me a copy of a Gartner report with a “magic quadrant.” I remember thinking that the Gartner approach did not make much use of the type of analysis cranked out by the blue chip firms. Remember that the MBAs and assorted whiz kids manipulated hard data such as sales by region, product margin, legal costs, research and development expenditures, and the like as the foundation on which the BCG matrix stood. Not the Gartner analysis. My recollection is vivid. The data seemed soft. I was thinking that whoever generated a soft matrix at Booz, Allen or one of the other blue chip firms where I have labored as a rental would have met with considerable push back.
Applying the BCG matrix to a business sector known for project failures, cost overruns, user dissatisfaction, and marketing baloney was likely to create some vendors with noses out of joint. The pure numerics of the BCG matrix focused on a single company or an industry sector and had data behind it. One’s nose could be out of joint, but the data are the data. Subjective analyses are just that, subjective and inherently impressionistic. Sales data are sales data. One can argue about how the data were collected, but the numbers are what they are.
Imagine my surprise when I read the Forbes.com article “Auto0nomy Positioned in Top Players Quadrant in Radicati Group Magic Quadrant” here. I have no quibble with Autonomy being listed as a leading vendor. What struck me was that the Radicati Group seemed to have borrowed heavily from the Gartner magic quadrant, itself a borrowing from the original BCG matrix.
My thought was, “I wonder if Radicati is hooked up with Gartner?” In my opinion, we have a mini-boomlet in azure chipped consultants recycling ideas. In my opinion, I think these derivatives of the original BCG matrix should:
- State the data on which the rankings or recommendations were based
- Provide hard data, not impressions
- Offer links to fungible data.
Perhaps Beyond Search should cook up a multi-celled, hypercube and populate it with rankings of the more than 300 vendors in the search and content processing space? Perhaps Beyond Search should ignore the market realities and plug in little known systems as vendors who are poised to trample the giants like Autonomy and Google? I don’t think this type of exercise is much more than a publicity and marketing play.
A similar situation is evident in Gartner’s use of the Burton Group’s notion of a “superplatform” recast as a “megavendor”. See here.
Edith Wharton, the American novelist, said as I recall, “True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” To revivify the flagging search and content processing sector, originality is needed. And quickly in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
What about that Search Technology
January 10, 2009
In 2002, IBM acquired Pricewaterhouse Coopers here. In 2007 here IBM and PWC agreed to pay more than $5.2 million to settle allegations of false claims. In January 2009 here Times Online reported that PWC was “in the spotlight” with regard to the Satyam issue. IBM sells search and content processing systems. IBM sells text mining and business intelligence systems. Does IBM use these systems to identifies anomalies like the alleged Satyam anomalies. This addled goose wonders if these systems work. If not, would this addled goose buy a business intelligence or search system from IBM? Nope.
Stephen Arnold, January 10, 2009
Lawyers and Metadata
January 8, 2009
Now the indexing world gets something to gnaw on. Automated indexing systems beat out humans when measured by cost per item indexed, speed, and consistency. Automated indexing systems can be as good as a human for some types of content. But humans are variably bad at indexing. Software hits a sweet spot and doesn’t get significantly better or worse unless the content throws in a wrench. Now the issue of not providing metadata arises. We can automate the creation of metadata, but it is early days in the world of automatic metadata scrubbing. I quacked happily when I thought, “I wonder who knows where their metadata are?”
Jim Calloway’s “Metadata–What Is It and Waht Are My Ethical Duties” here breathes new life into human indexing. What I find interesting is that lawyers charge by the hour. Human indexes are paid by piece work schedules or given a flat year fee and maybe some benefit crumbs. The economics of human indexing is based on keeping the per record cost as low as possible whilst one maintains the “quality” of the indexing. “Quality” in the commercial database world is often defined as a metric such as “four to six index terms per bibliographic record” or “16 records per hour with required fields completed”. You may have a more academic definition, but my examples come from the soon-to-be-marginalized world of human commercial database production.
The article defines metadata in terms of a legal eagle, of course. But the story gets interesting when Mr. Calloway cites a sitaution in which metadata became a legal issue. Where there is a legal issue, there is the risk of a fine, jail, or losing pride of place among the brood of legal eagles. Forget the compensation. Ego may be a bigger force in the legal eagle world. Mr. Calloway nicely hooks metadata with risk.
For me, the most important comment in this useful write up was:
In this writer’s view, the key is to avoid sending out documents with metadata that could disclose confidential information. Comparing metadata to a wrongly sent fax or e-mail is questionable and the idea that lawyers will be prohibited from examining metadata while parties, law enforcement officers and private detectives will be free to do so seems artificial at best. The Colorado rule that one must disclose receiving confidential information via metadata before acting on it seems to strike a rational balance. The best rule is for law firms to develop best practices internally to keep metadata from “escaping” in the first place.
I quite like “keep metadata from escaping in the first place”. To close, let me ask several questions:
- Do you know why metadata are in the documents available for indexing on your Web site
- Do you know how value added indexing in a dataspace can expand the access to a document in an often unrelated context
- Do you know where metadata are in a document, in a Web page or other containing housing the document, or in the dataspace created for the information objects?
If not, you will want to dig up this information yourself. Asking your attorney will result in a very large legal bill. One final question: Do you think Mr. Madoff knows about his metadata?
Stephen Arnold, January 8, 2009
Interview Exclusive: Exalead’s New US Chief Executive Officer
January 5, 2009
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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