Autonomy and Xerox in Tie Up
January 20, 2009
Big news in the world of content processing and search: Xerox and Autonomy have struck a deal. According to this news story on Forbes.com “Xerox DocuShare Enters into OEM Agreement with Autonomy”, “The new license will allow Xerox to integrate Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) technology into its DocuShare enterprise content management (ECM) platform.” Docushare is a content management system. The IDOL server will be integrated into the existing Docushare accounts worldwide.
David Smith, Xerox VP, said:
Content management technologies and services that help organizations save money, better manage content and improve efficiencies are essential in today’s business climate… The integration of Autonomy’s IDOL Server takes DocuShare’s ability to meet the needs of our global customer base to the next level.
Information about Docushare is here. Information about Autonomy IDOL is here. The content management sector has been hit by Microsoft’s SharePoint push. Other CMS vendors have beefed up their search and content processing services to withstand the “good enough” system available at competitive rates from Microsoft and its resellers. For example, Interwoven has a deal with Vivisimo.
The challenge for Xerox will be to hold on to its existing customers. The opportunity for Autonomy is to make upsells for other Autonomy functionality. If this deal works, perhaps Xerox will step forward and acquire Autonomy. The vendor has more than 16,000 licensees and a number of lucrative deals. Xerox has dabbled in search and content processing for many years. In fact, Microsoft licensed some of the Xerox search and content processing technology as part of Microsoft’s purchase of Powerset in 2008.
My question is, “What does Xerox know about Xerox PARC technology that prevents Xerox from using its own technology in the Docushare product?” This begs another question, “Does Microsoft know that Xerox has sidestepped Xerox PARC technology for the Autonomy IDOL system?”
Autonomy has a strong business in litigation support. I wonder if Xerox Litigation Services will avail itself of the Autonomy technology to address some of the shortcomings in the Xerox eDiscovery offerings. I don’t have any color for the financial terms of the deal. If I get some substantive information, I will post it.
Stephen Arnold, January 20, 2009
Semantico CEO Interviewed
January 19, 2009
Richard Padley is an engaging information, content and search wizard. I visited with his technical team at the Semantico exhibit at the Online London show. Unlike the US search conferences, the team working on the London show for Incisive does a much better job of attracting interesting speakers and exhibitors. Semantico works with organizations producing content. Mr. Padley helps these organizations make better use of staff time and prepare content so that it can be quickly and economically repurposed. I followed up with him in early January 2009 and managed to convince him to participate in a Search Wizards Speak interview. You can find the full text of that interview here.
One of the intriguing comments, Mr. Padley made was:
Because of the sort of company we are, it’s less about technology invention for us than about adaptation and selection. Open source is very important to us, for instance, and we’re strong believers in using the best tool for the job. In the past 18 months we’ve started using the Mark Logic database to build the publishing platforms we deliver – which is a very innovative platform. It allows us to put different kinds of content together and query them in ways that allow publishers to build new kinds of products, while still respecting the different sizes and shapes that content comes in. ‘Content in context’ is a phase I hate, but it does provide a way of getting a handle on this for the layman: it’s about providing small snippets of contextualized information within the workflow. Say you’re a vet – we can build a platform that can integrate reference information about veterinary medicine with available drugs and your own patient records, and so on.
What’s interesting is that MarkLogic has carved out an interesting niche providing a flexible, robust data management system. Now an ecosystem is beginning to form around that MarkLogic platform. Search, while a key function in Semantico’s arsenal, is secondary to solving information problems. As companies like Microsoft chase the search dream with questionable technologies that are getting long in the tooth, Semantico is helping create a new approach to content processing. Note: you can read the interview with Mark Logic’s top executive here.
You can get more information about Semantico here.
Stephen Arnold, January 19, 2009
Google’s Knol Milestone
January 18, 2009
Everyone in the drainage ditch in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, thinks Knol is a Wikipedia clone. This addled goose begs to differ. This addled goose thinks Knol is a way for the Google to obtain “knowledge” about topics and the experts who contribute to a Knol (a unit of knowledge). Sure, Knol can be used like Wikipedia, but the addled goose thinks the Knol is more, much, much more.
At any rate, the Google announced on January 16, 2008, after the goose tucked its head under its wing for the week that there are now 100,000 Knols. What this goose found interesting was the headline: “100,000th Knol Published.” I love that word “published”. Google emphasizes that it is not a publisher, but it is interesting to me how the word turns up. You can read the story here.
The blog post contains some interesting insights into Knol; for example, people from 197 countries visit Knol “on an average day.” The interface is available in eight languages. Visitors are editing Knols.
Now how long will it take Knol to reach one million entries?
Stephen Arnold, January 18, 2009
Cognition Technologies: Gospels Demo Available
January 18, 2009
Cognition Technologies has put up a new demo that allows users to search the Gospels of the Bible. The system has processed the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You can find the demo from the Cognition Technologies’ home page at http://www.cognition.com or here.
The company selected this corpus to showcase Cognition Technologies’ ability to deal with metaphorical language. The natural language processing system permits queries by words, phrases, and questions. The company said:
We have worked very hard to show companies interested in semantically-enabling their technologies that Cognition’s technology understands language and concept nuance.
Biblical texts are difficult to parse and tag. Keep this in mind when you look at the demo. The easiest content to process is tidy, scientific, technical, and medical content chock full of jargon. Texts like the Gospels are stuffed with fuzziness, concepts, and metaphors.
For more information about the Cognition Technologies’ system, you can explore the firm’s Web site or you can read an analysis in the Gilbane Group’s study “Beyond Search” here.
Stephen Arnold, January 18, 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
Search Goes Down, Google Turns on the Juice
January 8, 2009
I saw several Web log posts and major media (dead tree outfits) articles about the decline in Web travel searches. A representative story is “Internet Travel Searches Drop 42 Percent” here. UK journalistic endeavors amuse me no end. Honk. Honk. Laura Dixon wrote:
Internet searches for flights were down over 40 per cent in the week after Christmas according to Hitwise, a division of Experian. Traffic to travel Web sites for the same period – up to the week ending January 3 – was also down 16 per cent.
Interesting but not the sort of data that makes me flap my wings. The addled goose thinks that a quick visit to Google.com is in order. I wonder if Ms. Dixon has entered this query in the Google search box: SFO LAX. That’s it. Two three letter strings. These abbreviations refer to airports. Here’s what the GOOG displayed for me:
My thought is that if the number of queries is down, what’s the value of appearing as one of the seven featured air ticket sources underneath the structured query insert? In fact, in the last few months, there’s been some shuffling of the featured carriers. Notice too that the Google system automatically converted the airport pair into a query. Set the dates, pick a vendor, and bingo you get a list of options. Pretty handy for mobile phone users too. I wonder if Microsoft will offer this feature on its forthcoming Verizon service.
To me the downturn in flight searches means that the Google will turn on the juice to get more revenue from advertisers who must get traffic. That’s a more interesting angle for the addled goose to consider. But I live in rural Kentucky and am not affiliated with an oh-so-excellent dead tree publication. There you go.
Stephen Arnold, January 8, 2009
Google Semantics Surfacing
January 8, 2009
ReadWriteWeb.com (January 6, 2009) ran an interesting article that tiptoes around Google’s semantic activities. You will want to read “Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results”. Google won’t answer the question, of course. But the addled goose will, “Yep, where have you been since early 2007?” Let me point out that Marshall Kirkpatrick has done a good job of tracking down “in the wild” examples of Google’s machine-based semantic methods. These examples (and others in Google open source documents) make it clear that the semantic activities are chugging along and maturing nicely. “Semantics” as used in this write up means “figuring out what something is about.” Once one knows the “about” part of an information object, then other methods can hook these “about” metadata together. If you want to get a sense of the scope of the Google semantic system, click here. I have a checking copy of the report I wrote for BearStearns before that outfit went up in flames or down the drain. (Pick your metaphor.) My write up here does not include the detail that is in the full discussion in Google Version 2.0 here. But this draft provides some meat for the “in the wild” examples found in Mr. Kirkpatrick’s good article. How significant is the investment in semantics at Google? You can find some color on the sweep of Google’s semantic activities in the dataspace white paper Sue Feldman and I wrote (September 2008). You can get this report from IDC; it is report number 213562.
Let me close with three observations:
- Google is deeply involved in semantics, but with a Googley twist. Watching for examples in the wild is a very useful activity, especially for competitors
- The notion of semantics is sufficiently broad to embrace metadata generation and new types of metadata so that new types of data constructs can be automatically generated by Google. Think publishing new constructs for money.
- The competitors chasing Google face the increasingly likely prospect that Google has jumped over its own present position and will land even farther ahead of the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Yahoo. Forget them. The smart Yahooligans are either at Google or surfing on Google.
Now I expect some push back from the anti Google crowd. Have at it. Just make sure you have internalized Google’s technical papers, Google “talks”, and the patent documentation. This goose is not too interested in uninformed challenges. You can read more about Google semantics and in my forthcoming Google and Publishing study from my trusty publisher Infonortics Ltd. located near Oxford, England, in the spring.
Stephen Arnold, January 8, 2009
New Conference Pushes beyond Search
January 5, 2009
After watching some of the traditional search and content processing conferences fall on their swords, muffins, and self-assurance in 2008, I have rejiggled my conference plans for 2009. One new venue that caught my attention is The Rockley Group’s event in Palm Springs, California, January 29-30, 2009. You can get more informatio0n about the program here. The event organizer is Ann Rockley, who is one of the people emphasizing the importance of intelligent content.
Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group
I spoke with Ms. Rockley on January 2, 2008. The text of that conversation appears below:
Why is another conference needed?
Admittedly there are a lot of conferences around for people to attend, but not one that focuses specifically on the topic of Intelligent Content. My background is content management, structured content and XML. There are lots of conferences that focus mainly on the technology, others that focus on the content vehicle or channel (e.g., web) and others that focus on XML. The technology oriented conferences often lose sight of the content; who it’s for, how can we most effectively create it and most importantly how can we optimize it for our customers. The content channel oriented conferences e.g. Web, focus only on the vehicle and forget that content is not just about the way we distribute it; content should be optimized for each channel yet at the same time it should be possible to repurpose and reconfigure the content for multiple channels. And XML conferences tend to be highly technical, focusing on the code and the applications and not on how we can optimize our content using XML so that we can manipulate it and transform it much the way we do data. So this conference is all about the CONTENT! Identifying how we can most effectively create it so that we can manipulate it, transform it and deliver it in a multitude of ways personalized for a particular audience is an area of focus sadly lacking in many conferences.
With topics like Web 2.0 and Social Search I am at a loss to know what will be covered. What are the issues your conference will address?
Web 2.0 is about social networking and sharing of content and media and it has had a tremendous influence on content. Organizations have huge volumes of content stuck in static web pages or files and they have a growing volume of content stuck, and sometimes lost in the masses of content being accumulated in wikis, blogs, etc. How can organizations integrate their content, share their content and make it most useful to their customers and readers without a lot of additional work? How do we combine the best of Web 2.0 with the best of traditional content practices? Organizations don’t have the time, resources or budget to do all the things we need and want to do for our customers, but if we create our content intelligently in the first place (structure it, tag it, store it) we can increase our ability to do so much more and increase our ability to effectively meet our customers’ needs. This conference was specifically designed to answer those questions.
Intelligent Content provides a venue for sharing information on such topics as:
- Personalization (structured content, metadata and XQuery)
- Intelligent publishing (dynamic multichannel delivery)
- Hybrid content strategies (integrating Web 2.0 content with traditional customer content)
- Dynamic messaging/personalized marketing
- Increasing findability
- Content/Information Management
Most attendees complain about two things: The quality of the presentations and the need for better networking with other attendees. How are you addressing these issues?
We are doing things a little differently. All the speakers have been assigned a mentor for review of their outline, drafts and final materials. We are working with them closely to ensure that the presentations are top notch and we have asked them all to summarize their information in Best Practices and Tips. In addition, Intelligent Content was designed to be a small intimate conference with lots of opportunities to network. We will have a luncheon with tables focused on special interests and we are arranging “Birds of a Feather” dinners where like-minded people can get together over a great meal and chat, have fun and network. We also have a number of panels which are designed to work interactively with the audience. And to increase the feeling intimacy we have not chosen to hold the conference in a traditional “big box” hotel, rather we have chosen a boutique hotel, the Parker Palm Springs (http://www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1911), a hotel favored by Hollywood stars from the 1930s. It is a very cool hotel with lots of character that encourages people to have fun while they interact and network.
What will you offer attendees?
The two day conference includes 16 sessions, 2 panels, breakfast, lunch and snacks. It also includes organized networking sessions both for lunch and dinner, and opportunities to ask the Experts key questions. And the conference isn’t over when it is over, we are setting up a Community of Practice including a blog, discussion forum, and webinars to continue to share and network so that every attendee will have an instant ongoing network.
I enjoy small group sessions and simple things like going to dinner with a group of people whom I don’t know. Will you include activities to help attendees make connections?
Absolutely. We deliberately designed the conference to be a small intimate learning experiencing so people weren’t lost in the crowd and we have specifically created a number of luncheon and dinner networking experiences.
How can I register to attend? What is the url for more information.
The conference information can be found at www.intelligentcontent2009.com. Contact info@intelligentcontent2009.com if you have questions. Note that the conference hotel is really a vacation destination so we can only hold the rooms at the special rate for a limited time and that expires January 12th so act quickly. And we’ve extended the early bird registration to Jan. 12 as well. If you have any other questions you can contact us at moreinfo@rockley.com.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2008
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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