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.
Exclusive Interview: Digital Reasoning
February 2, 2010
Tim Estes, the youthful founder and chief technologist, for Digital Reasoning, a search and content processing company based in Tennessee, reveals the technology the is driving the company’s growth. Mr. Estes, a graduate of the University of Virginia, tackled the problem of information overload with a fresh approach. You can learn about Digital Reasoning’s approach that delivers a system that “deeply, conceptually searches within unstructured data, analyzes it and presents dynamic visual results with minimal human intervention. It reads everything, forgets nothing and gets smarter as you use it.”
Mr. Estes explained:
Digital Reasoning’s core product offering is called “Synthesys.” It is designed to take an enterprise from disparate data silos (both structured and unstructured), ingest and understand the data at an entity level (down to the “who, what, and wheres” that are mentioned inside of documents), make it searchable, linkable, and provide back key statistics (BI type functionality). It can work in an online/real-time type fashion given its performance capabilities. Synthesys is unique because it does a really good job at entity resolution directly from unstructured data. Having the name “Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab” misspelled somewhere in the data is not a big deal for us – because we create concepts based on the patterns of usage in the data and that’s pretty hard to hide. It is necessarily true that a word grounds its meaning to the things in the data that are of the same pattern of usage. If it wasn’t the case no receiving agent could understand it. We’ve figured out how to reverse engineer that mental process of “grounding” a word. So you can have Abdulmutallab ten different ways and it doesn’t matter. If the evidence links in any statistically significant way – we pull it together.
You can read the full-text of this exclusive interview with Tim Estes on the ArnoldIT.com site in the Search Wizard Speak series. You can get more information about Digital Reasoning from the company’s Web site.
The Search Wizards Speak series provides the largest collection of free, detailed information about major enterprise search systems.Why pay the azure-chip consultants for sponsored listings, write ups prepared by consultants with little or no hands on experience, and services that “sell” advertorials. You hear in the developer’s, founders, and CEO’s own words what a system does and how it solves content-related problems.
Stephen E Arnold, February 2, 2010
No one paid me to write about my own Web site. I will report this charitable act to the head of the Red Cross.
Autonomy Pops Up an Email Archiving Toaster
January 31, 2010
Autonomy is in the appliance business. You can get what The Orange Rag called “the Autonomy eDiscovery Appliance.” The idea is that the features of a Clearwell-type of solution is combined with Autonomy’s smart software and connectors. The solution, according to The Orange Rag: “delivers a broad set of unique capabilities” and “meaning based computing”. Among the features embedded in the appliance are search, connectors to various content types, visualization, scalability, and reports. The appliance that has captured some loyal fans is the Clearwell Systems’ “rocket docket” service in its appliance. Clearwell now has a formidable competitor, and I wonder if the value-added software that allows a report to be generated that can be slapped in the hand of opposing counsel and a nifty audit trail feature will be enough to deal with the steroid infused marketing of Autonomy. Should be interesting because Recommind has tried to broaden beyond the legal market in a bid to become an enterprise search vendor. Stratify has morphed several times in its eDiscovery journey. EMC bought Kazeon and may be getting ready to attack the legal eagles from the storage angle. I suppose this is what the azure chip crowd calls “search specialization”. I thought it was savvy product packaging, but what do I know. I am not young and inclined to perceive myself as infallible. I am an addled goose who forgets when he puts his pin feathers.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2010
A freebie. I will report this unpleasant fact to the director of the US Postal Museum where old information methods are on display.
Autonomy and Precise Team Up
January 24, 2010
Autonomy continues to sniff trends and move before other players in the enterprise search and content processing space. I saw a short announcement on Sharecast (a service with more weird pop ups than most Web sites I visit) that said:
Search software firm Autonomy is teaming up with UK-based media intelligence outfit Precise to develop and market next-generation media intelligence services to the public relations and communications sectors.
Autonomy is well known to readers of this Web log. Precise may not be. Here’s a quick run down on that outfit:
- The company is in the “media intelligence” business. This is somewhat similar to the old style Bacon’s clipping service put on steroids.
- The company has more than 5,000 customers and a big chunk of them are in the financial services and information sector. The idea is that media monitoring provides open source information that Precise converts into intelligence about what a company will or may do. This is the enterprise version of government intelligence agency operations.
- The chief information officer comes from the real time information side of the business. (This suggests to me that Autonomy is deep into the real time content processing spaghetti.)
- The company’s description of its services sounds almost Googley: “Our Media Portal allows our clients to view and evaluate the impact of coverage from every media source – print, broadcast, online. In addition they can access forward planning data at the touch of a button.”
My take on this is that Autonomy will be nosing into other real time information sectors as well. Some of the incumbents may find that Autonomy’s marketing and its corporate clout will push them out of their comfortable positions. Who will be affected by Autonomy if it moves in this direction? That’s a good question.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write about this tie up. I suppose I shall report this sad fact to MARAD, an outfit that knows about brown water tie ups.
Information Builders WebFOCUS Magnify
January 22, 2010
I wrote about Information Builders in my report for the Gilbane Group a couple of years ago. I was updating my files, and I wanted to pass along a bit of information about this product. Information Builders is a vendor of enterprise solutions. The company spans data management, business intelligence, and dashboards. You can get basic information about the firm’s products on the firm’s Web site. There are some diagrams showing how Information Builders’ software “snaps in” to most enterprise computing infrastructures.
Information Builders rolled out more than 100 changes to its WebFOCUS product line. According to TDWI, there have changes to the dashboard and the predictive analytics. For search, TDWI says:
“WebFOCUS Magnifyƒz a search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities, has been updated with new features designed to enhance both usability and security. Highlights include:
-
- Collections, enabling users to select a collection that narrows their search to a specific part of the index, prior to their submission
- Magnify iWay Wizard, helping users to quickly set up a Magnify environment, instructing them how to handle each field when transforming a record into a search result
- New security features including single sign-on integration, multiple credential support, the ability to hide entire results and parts of results, and present alternate-result rendering as well as a security API”.
The search product indexes content, using what the company calls “real-time transactional indexing method”. The results list provides relevance ranked output plus facets to allow point and click navigation. The screenshot below shows one possible results display. The system is fully customizable, so you can create the look and feel you want.
If you are an Information Builders’ customer running the company’s business intelligence system, the search system (WebFOCUS Magnify) integrates with that Information Builders’ product. The company says:
A user’s inquiry does not end with search results. Those results will often lead to new questions, which, in order to be answered, require numbers analysis, aggregations, and value comparisons that can only be achieved through business intelligence. For example, a search for a bank account may lead the user to want to know more about its cash flow patterns, expenditures by time frame, and other transactions. Magnify allows a user to drill down directly from search results into the reporting system, so any natural language search can be instantly expanded to include numbers analysis. Search terms are fed to the WebFOCUS platform as parameters that automatically trigger the generation of reports or guided ad hoc forms that can be used to further refine report content.
The company added support for Web content three or four years ago. You can read about this aspect of WebFOCUS in “Information Builders Google-izes BI.” The company has been surfing on Google for a couple of years. You can get an overview of Information Builders’ Google components on the Google Solutions Marketplace.
I have never been able to get a firm grip on the Information Builders’ pricing for its search and content processing technology. I did learn that the WebFOCUS Intelligent Search component for the Google OneBox for Enterprise is free. You can learn more about this product from the Google Solutions Marketplace. You can read about this “surf on Google” play in the March 2006 Computer World article “Information builders, Google Build Corporate BI Search Tool.” I just haven’t heard much about the success of this software component.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2010
Okay, here’s the scoop. A freebie. I will report this to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an outfit that combines work and data analysis. That’s the oversight group for me.
Stratify Software India
January 13, 2010
Some interesting information about Stratify, a unit of Iron Mountain, surfaced in a job posting for an engineer in Bangalore. In India, Stratify does business as Stratify Software India Pvt Ltd. The part of the advert that caught my attention was this description of Stratify as a Software as a Service company. Here’s the snippet I found interesting:
Stratify is a Product company which provides electronic discovery or unstructured Data mining solutions through Software as a Service Model. We are a fully owned subsidiary of Iron Mountain, the world’s largest Data Storage, protection and Recovery company with $3 Billion revenue. We are market leaders in our space and have registered 25-30% growth last year and 70% per annum growth in the previous 4 years. We have mostly Fortune-1000 companies as our clients. Iron Mountain, our parent company, has more than 13,000 employees.
Stratify, originally Purple Yogi, came on my radar as a text and content processing company. Now the firm is a provider of electronic discovery or unstructured data mining solutions. I also think the growth of Iron Mountain is a useful factoid as well.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 13, 2010
A freebie. I suppose this disclosure falls under the purview of the ExIm Bank to which I shall report the fact that I got no money for this item. Don’t you feel better knowing I wrote this because I have only a small pond in which to swim.
Are Google Users Ready to Step Up to Fusion Tables? Nah.
December 16, 2009
WolframAlpha and Google have a tiny challenge. Both firms’ rocket scientists and algorithm wranglers understand the importance of herding data. Take this simple test. Navigate first to WolframAlpha and enter a word pair. Try UK population. Now navigate to Google’s public facing Fusion table demo here. What did you get? How did it work? Do you know why the systems responded as they did? How do you improve your query?
My hunch is that few readers of this Web log can answer these questions? Agree? Disagree? Well, I am not running an academic class, so if you flunked, that’s okay with me. I think most people will flunk, including some of the lesser lights at the Google and at WolframAlpha.
Against this background, the Google rolled out an API for Fusion tables. You can get the Googley story in the write up “Google Fusion Tables API.” My view is that Google’s moves in structured data are quite important, generally unknown, and essentially incomprehensible to those who suffered through high school algebra.
My opinion is that this API will result in some applications that will make Google’s significant commitment and investment in structured data more understandable. If you are ahead of the curve, the Google is on the march. If you have no clue what this post means, maybe you should think about changing careers. Wal+Mart greeter is somewhat less challenging that the intricacies of Google’s context server technology.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 16, 2009
Okay, I rode by Google’s DC headquarters. No one waved. No one paid me. I suppose I report this fact to the manger of the Union Station taxi dispatchers. Nah, those folks don’t care that this is a freebie either.
Connotate and Its Landing Page
December 15, 2009
Getting leads and making sales is the name of the game for enterprise search vendors. I think I found an example of a search vendor using Twitter and a landing page to get leads. Here’s the tweet that I saw from a person posting as dnapoleo.
This bit.ly link pointed to this special landing page:
I found this interesting. I wonder, however, if this type of marketing will deliver qualified leads. Making sales today requires a heck of a lot of work. The cost and complexity of enterprise search and content processing systems seems ill suited for Twitter. A quick look at my Overflight service reveals that a balanced marketing plan is the approach taken by Autonomy, Coveo, Exalead, and MarkLogic, for example.
In fact, making sales requires a motivated sales force, brand positioning, resellers, Web logs, media campaigns using every trick in the sales books at Barnes & Noble, and client champions. It is December and cold out there. Sales heat is needed.
Contrast the Connotate approach to Google’s use of a paper wrap around to the free commuter newspaper, Metro. Google was pitching its Chrome “consumer” Web browser.
Connotate’s effort warrants watching. Now that AOL has repositioned Relegence.com as Love.com, I think some market headroom may become available for Connotate.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 15, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I am disclosing that no one paid me to write about Connotate’s possible tweet campaign. Who’s on first? Oh, I know. I am reporting today to the Farm Credit Administration. Grow those revenues, people!
Search, Its Biggest Change, and Yawns
December 8, 2009
I try to steer clear of the search engine optimization crowd. A reader sent me a link to a write up called “Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention”. The idea is that Google can personalize search results for every user in the world. Search Engine Land slaps the word “biggest” on this Google announcement. The idea is that users should be revved up, excited, concerned, involved, etc.
I suppose I should be excited, but the personalization can be turned off. I have noticed shaped search results for quite a while. The scale interests me. Personalization is one consequence of Google’s adaptive functions. Newly visible to users, not new.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Geological Survey (USGS) that this new world has been explored already. I did my write up without any payment. Tough to charge money to state the obvious.
MarkLogic and Its XML Briefing Draw Crowds at London Online
December 4, 2009
Usually I ignore the exhibit areas at trade shows. I don’t know anyone any longer, and the average age of most of the people in the booths is about one third of my 65 years. I did make a sweep through the Incisive International Online Show but I had my progress impeded yesterday. The reason was that the MarkLogic briefings given every hour or so created a mini-traffic jam.
Overflow crowds participated in the MarkLogic technical briefings at the International Online Show, December 1 to 3, 2009, in London, UK.
The briefings drew crowds that overflowed the space allocated for attendees. I asked one of the XML wizards, “What’s with the big crowd?” The MarkLogic wizard replied, “Our MarkLogic server briefing is selling like cold drinks at a football match.” MarkLogic knows its XML and its metaphors. The interest in XML MarkLogic style makes clear that where there is technical magnetism, there is a crowd.
Stephen Arnold, December 4, 2009
I want to disclose to the Food & Drug Administration that I was not paid by MarkLogic to write this article. I was not able to get a booth giveaway when I stopped to ask about the reason for the interest in the XML server lectures. I have to find a way to get some cash for my photographic expertise.
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