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Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 1

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.

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