Asia Technical Services
April 20, 2011
An Interview with Patrick and Jean Garez
In Hong Kong in late March 2011, I met with one of the senior officers of Asia Tech. The company’s official name is “Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd.” I learned about the company from Dassault Exalead. For eight years Asia Tech has been the partner for Exalead in Asia and has become the “go to” resource for the Dassault Systèmes team covering South Asia regarding Exalead after the acquisition. Based in Singapore, Asia Tech is hours away from Dassault clients in Thailand, China, and Viet-Nam, among other countries whose thirst for Dassault technology continues to increase. In my initial conversation with Jean Garez, the person who appears to be the heir apparent to the firm his father founded, I learned that Asia Tech is now responding to a surge of inquiries about Exalead’s search based applications.
Patrick (founder) and Jean Garez (senior manager), Asia Technology Services Pte Ltd.
Upon my return to the US, I followed up with Mr. Garez via Skype for a more lengthy discussion. On the call, Patrick Garez joined the interview. For convenience, I have merged the comments from both Garezs into one stream. The full text of that interview appears below:
What’s the history of Asia Tech?
Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd was first conceived in Hong Kong in 1974 by our founder, and my father, Patrick Garez. The original business was the marketing and after-sales support of products, engineering services and asset management solutions to the commercial aviation industry. My father was a pioneer because he was among the first to predict the growth potential of commercial aviation in the Asia Pacific region and to identify Singapore as the future hub for South East Asia and beyond.
Along the way ATS tackled some industry-specific software solutions supporting various maintenance data management, engineering processes and workflows, but it wasn’t until 2003 that ATS officially began distributing software solutions as a dedicated part of our business.
What triggered the shift?
Client demand. ATS has prided itself on responding to the needs of its clients across this region. Once we started doing work in a different area, word of mouth sent additional projects our way.
ATS focuses on finding leading edge innovative and cost effective ISV solutions from Europe and the US and offering them a platform to enter into the Asia Pacific market with a limited investment.
And your activity in search?
Same path.
In the mid-2000’s up until probably 2009, the search market in Singapore and the region was dominated by legacy platforms built with an 80’s approach key word indexing and information retrieval. There was some interest in the SPSS and SAS approach to structured data, of course.
However, in response to a client project, we came across a technologically-advanced company in Paris, France. The founder was a member of the original Digital Equipment AltaVista.com search team and making significant progress with technology that was scalable and very, very speedy. In addition, Exalead was deploying a lighter, automated semantic engine that did the thinking for the user by automatically categorizing and providing structure to unstructured data. We tapped them for our client project from then on, we knew we were going to see great things from them. We continued to follow and participate in the growth of this company from their incubation phase until its acquisition in 2010 by Dassault Systems. ATS remains its partner for the region.
What interested you in search and content processing?
That’s a great question. I don’t think I ever thought about it.
I think it was in University when I really began to understand the complexity of information management and disliked the way institutions addressed it; which was most often to make it more difficult to find what you were looking for than not. Back then there was an information technology laboratory at one end of the campus. At the other end the library with its many rows of hand typed reference cards. The disconnect between the two always struck me as unusual.
Search was just on my radar so to speak.
Then what happened?
After graduating from University I landed a plum job in a prestigious Marketing Research & Consulting firm called DYG Inc., which was an associated company to the Daniel Yankelovich Group. It was my first taste of the “enterprise” environment where WordPerfect, PowerPoint and SPSS were the dominant tools of our trade. There I discovered the power of the Web and through Mosaic, Netscape, and their successors, was drawn in by the immensity of it all. Searching for information was quite difficult and very time consuming. I started looking for solutions and, thus, began a long period of tire kicking and investigation what is now called “enterprise search” and its child technologies like semantics, natural language processing, content conversion, analytics, etc.
I was given an opportunity in 2002 to help my father create an IT Division within ATS and the Exalead search tool was one of the first enterprise information systems we started to look at. It was hard to consider working with any competing brands after that as the cost benefits just didn’t seem to add up for me.
Was price the main concern?
No, it was the combination of value and the intuitive manner in which Exalead organized information, and then presented it as tools to help the user, convinced us that we had to be in this business. We knew that Exalead’s fast cycle release approach would help us propel our customers forward. Selling a search or search enabled application solution is not a quick process. We have to deal with cultural and budget issues like our competitors in this region and elsewhere. The pace is now quite remarkable, which underlines the wisdom of our original decision based on our analysis of the firm’s technology and our continued client successes.
What has been the payoff from your long interest in information retrieval?
I think our effort has allowed us to be a step ahead of our firms providing services similar to ours. For the last 37 years ATS has made it a point of associating itself with leading-edge technology providers, who are often “ahead” of the market. Patrick Garez identified Exalead as a game changer in 2002. My research supported that original analysis. We were correct. Exalead is one of the premier enterprise platforms. It is much more than search.
So the payoff is that, even after the June 2010 acquisition by Dassault Systèmes, ATS remains a partner of Exalead for the region and now has the added benefit of leveraging off of Dassault’s 20 years of experience in the region to develop the market even farther and faster.
Finally, we have been really impressed with the DS team here in Singapore, India and the region. It is not often one finds an organization of that size that is so well integrated and organized. They are business men not salesmen, and their dedication to long term growth in the region mirrors our corporate ethos of service and value for our customers.
Many vendors argue that mash ups are and data fusion are “the way information retrieval will work going forward? Will this approach work in Asia?
We see “Data-fusion” and the “mash-up” as integral to what is being referred to as Enterprise 2.0. In the past, data access/data retrieval in structured data and unstructured data were opposing poles on a magnet and, as the saying goes, “…Never the Twain Shall Meet”.
Consumerism is forcing companies to address the demands of the market and their employees for smarter, more productive tools to perform their business functions, effectively to become more agile. This translates to simplifying the way users interact with data by democratizing access to it and delivering intelligent tools to navigate through today’s “big data”.
We see the same paradigm shift away from gatekeepers to empowered users across a corporate structure among our clients that you described in your talk in Hong Kong. The mashup trend is definitely opening new opportunities for our company as people come to understand the value it creates.
Without divulging your firm’s methods, will you characterize a typical use case for the search technology your firm makes available to your clients/partners?
We have a proprietary method for managing costs and delivering what our client requires. I don’t want to dig into that. I can say that the typical use case for Exalead significantly changed when the CloudView platform was released in 2009. While the quality of search remains the same as when Exalead was a point solution for enterprise search across unstructured data sources, we are now moving away from traditional enterprise search as the main engagement message.
The fact that CloudView is supports federated search across any data source (structured or unstructured) and present those results contextually in a single interface for traditional text search, while also delivering real time analytical reporting dashboards allows us a unique positioning within the regional market.
We mostly work by the book, emphasizing tight specifications, thoughtful planning, realistic budgeting, and continual interaction with our client. In a sense, what we do is like other blue chip engineering firms. The difference is that just listen to the clients. Some firms talk about listening. We listen and ask questions.
Our clients now tend to consist of companies with data spread across a multitude of different platforms that are not just Microsoft, and providing a 360 degree view of their data for extended customer relationship management, business intelligence, or customer support.
What are the benefits to a commercial organization or a government agency when working with your firm?
ATS has been delivering value solutions to our customers in the region for over 35 years. This is testament to our simple philosophy of developing business with a long term view rather than focusing on short-term gain. Satisfied customers make return customers and we have never sold a product that we did not believe in or that a customer did not need. As a result we have built trust with our customers and this is what we believe is our strongest selling point as a company.
Asia Tech has become more of a consulting operation and services are often among the highest margin offerings an organization can offer. Is the need to sell consulting altering the simplicity of the installation, configuration, tuning, and customization of Asia Tech?
Actually, there has always been a strong consultative component within ATS on the aviation side of the business so it was not unfamiliar territory for us.
It is true that the beauty of Exalead is its simplicity, from the user and the vendor standpoint. Among other things, the Search by Serendipity™ guided navigation approach, brainchild of Exalead founders François Bourdoncle and Patrice Bertin, did so much to simplify the way users interacted with unstructured information, it was one of the things we loved about this product. From Day One, Exalead was a straight license sale with some customization.
However, Enterprise Search in this region has often been classified by our clients as a “point solution”, “good to have” but not mission critical. Our attention was so often focused on educating clients about the value of federated search often times we were relegated in perceived priority behind other infrastructure projects with buzz words and big brands. The success story of Singapore’s economy is its ability to attract the Fortune 500’s of the world and the consequence is that big brands are considered as safe. We are getting there!
With the new platform we have been able to present a much broader value proposition that is not limited to certain functionalities. We have had to make some core changes to our sales approach, but this has also allowed us to be more creative in our approach to the information access and retrieval problem and how it can be used to deliver value. It is a positioning I am enjoying immensely as it not only offers increased revenue potential but is opening up people’s minds to the future.
How does an information retrieval engagement move through its life cycle?
As I said, the engagement process for Exalead remains quite straightforward, with a few very interesting twists related to the CloudView platform. Now we can offer real-time reporting, analytics and decision support as part of the federated search process, delivering true 360 degree view of a business on average within a few weeks.
Our focus remains selling licenses and enabling customers by providing them with the means to fish for themselves, not to be dependent on a vendor every time they get hungry. This has always been a key cost benefit of Exalead over our competitors. The consulting part has certainly grown on the front end, but the life-cycle remains roughly the same, about three, maybe five, months.
Exalead is effectively an out of the box solution which you can plug-n-play and start using the same afternoon or configure as you like for the more complex requirements. This blend of simplicity by design with industrial level configurability makes for a truly heady brew that we offer to clients and it is why customers are coming to us rather than our competitors.
Is Exalead a higher profile solution today than it was two years ago?
Yes. The tie up with Dassault has been like a turbo boost. Where Exalead lagged a bit in the past in this region was in brand recognition. In this region, a low profile brand automatically translates to higher perceived risk.
Before Dassault, we found that with many prospects, keen interest amongst technical personnel who is dealing with the operational requirements, and hesitancy amongst those at management level who have think it will be too difficult to present to the board if it don’t have a brand name.
The acquisition of Exalead by Dassault Systems [a €1,5 Billion software company] has helped change this initial reflex and with information technology budgets shrinking despite growing needs for efficiency, management is having to become more creative, looking beyond the usual suspects to get more bang for their buck and Exalead is well positioned to deliver on that promise.
One challenge to those involved with squeezing useful elements from large volumes of content is the volume of content AND the rate of change in existing content objects. What does your firm provide to customers to help them deal with the volume problem?
ATS created a dedicated information technology division for the delivery of value solutions for the enterprise space in 2003. We were fortunate at that time to partner with a number of emerging independent software vendors who were conceiving new ways of resolving complexity, from system optimization, manufacturing process control, human behavior modeling and federated search. The solutions ATS proposes are still two to three years ahead of the competition in terms of performance and agility.
The other aspect of “big” is the amount of structured and unstructured information our clients face each day.
“Exa” is the scientific term for 1018. Exalead was borne as a hybrid solution with a web DNA, design for the enterprise environment. It was conceived with volume in mind and has repeatedly outperformed its nearest competitors in performance tests which were conducted by our clients. It is one of the reasons why so many Exalead customers are willing to offer us their testimonials and speak to new prospective customers of ours.
In terms of dealing with the rate of change in highly transactional environments, we offer our clients a range of quasi-real time update options on the CloudView platform that adapts best to their business and requirements, whether on the web (Manutan, Yellow Pages in the UK, FR, CA, Hometrader.com, Yakaz, SKYBlog, Exalead.com, etc.) or in the enterprise (GEFCO, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Bel [worldwide], Air Liquide [worldwide], BNP Parisbas, The Scottish Government Service, etc.) Exalead is consistently chosen for its ability to assure freshness of data.
What does your firm offer licensees to address this issue of content “push”, report generation, and personalization within a work flow?
A workflow can be built within Exalead to alert licensee’s of most any important event related to the content being indexed through email, text message, etc. In addition these alerts can be subsequently linked to a custom report that will present the incident/event against a time-scale, juxtaposed against all other related information that happened at the time of the event, compared against historical data and presented in a way that helps the user make informed decisions on the spot (based on triggers such as key performance indicators for a task or a person) or dig further through the data to identify a root cause.
What’s your view of the repository versus non repository approach to content processing?
I have yet to come across any defined drawback to this approach. With Exalead you can offload all process hungry query and reporting functions from legacy operational systems, which improves their efficiency and often reduces server space previously needed to support them.
Secondly, the Exalead repository is a binary store, which takes up a fraction of the space other systems would require to centralize and rationalize consolidated data, resulting in no duplication and removing any risk of effecting original operational data.
Finally, you can do anything you want with the data you collect. By this I mean you are not bound by a structured format. Exalead will automatically apply a logic to the data it indexes either by default parameters or user defined ones, but the results are fluid. It applies semantic rules at time of indexing, scoring results based on powerful semantic and statistic relevance methods, but does not limit how you view or navigate through the data.
What’s the capability of Asia Tech to cope with XML content in a MarkLogic, Oracle or DB2 repository?
We can deal with data from these sources in native format or as XML output depending on the user preference. We offer a number of API’s to configure the front-end output
Is there an appetite for visualizations?
Yes, graphics and visual touches are becoming increasingly important.
Exalead outputs are very different from standard reporting tools. Instead of limiting you to a choice of templates Exalead offers you a drag and drop environment in which to customize and build a dashboard. Parameters can be offered to the end-user to add or remove categories or fields and formatted outputs can be pushed to any mobile interface for real-time access to critical decision making information.
What’s your take on the “new” method which some people describe as “search enabled applications“?
I think that search based applications represent a game changing option for small and large companies alike. The current options out there for a company looking to move from disparate heterogeneous system environment to a centralized operation are to restructure, replace or build. All of these options are disruptive.
Each option mentioned above implies tremendous time devoted to planning, requirements gathering, steering committees, change management consultants, product evaluations, procurement, hiring of specialized staff, training…..before you know it 20 months has gone by and your trying to figure out why your no longer on budget and 4 months off schedule!
A learned colleague of mine at Accenture shared a wonderful anecdote in a panel session on negotiation recently. He paraphrased Mike Tyson on the subject of planning: “They all had a plan before they got hit”.
Tyson relied on power delivered on the first punch, not 13 rounds later. With search based applications, we can promise and then deliver the same level of quality with one platform that adapts to the changes in your company and the market as they happen rather than after.
We can do this without making you change your data environment, delivering fresh, targeted results through customized interfaces that require little or no training to use. That kind of agility put’s our customers at an advantage over their competitors that would be hard for them to replicate.
How does Asia Tech Asia Tech see the computing world over the next 12 to 18 months?
I see the tablet and mobile devices coming out as a permanent fixture in the enterprise environment. They offer considerable productivity gains in terms of when I can respond to a business issue and with the wider tablet screens, what I can realistically accomplish do on a mobile device . Then again, nobody wants to create a PowerPoint presentation on their blackberry, and it’s unlikely that your going to want to build an animation sequence or model on your iPad.
Right now we are seeing many medium to large corporations migrating to the latest server generations and exploring “virtualization” options. Some are considering what services can they run in the cloud, but most of these initiatives are being driven by the desire to push capital and operating expenditures down.
As you say though, there will remain a need for evermore robust physical infrastructures to support robust desktop solutions in the cloud. In the next 18 months we will definitely see a strong shift to hosted application environments driven by OEM’s to hedge against loses in traditional license sales.
We see ATS and Exalead as offering many companies the missing link that will enable them to leap forward in the value chain while keeping their existing infrastructures, pushing real-time performance indicators and dashboards anywhere you are in the world.
Put on your wizard hat. What are the three most significant technologies that you see affecting your search business?
Search based applications would be the most significant technology that is affecting the enterprise search sector now. We are seeing a split in the vendor space with those sticking to enterprise Search, eDiscovery, Archive search, etc. and those who have shifted their strategies to become promoters of a method closely identified with Exalead.
Some of the major software powerhouses who are recognizing the value of search as the weakest link in their solution stacks and trying to buy their way in. For example, Microsoft’s acquisitions of Fast Search & Technology and Powerset. Last week we showed Exalead’s performance on data set, and one of the client’s professionals suggested that the speed was not a real world behavior. It was, so buying technology does not always solve a tough information retrieval problem.
The big platform and document management players are acquiring point solutions to fill gaps in their solution sets and ensure you do everything with them. Certainly Microsoft present a big competitive barrier to entry as clients are most often lazy, and as mentioned before, risk averse. If they only have to go to one vendor to address 65% of my requirements and there name is Company X then it is easier for me to do that than look at two vendors and resolve 95 percent of my requirements.
In these times of austerity I am confident that reason and value will triumph over convenience. It will reduce the field a bit in terms of customers as many customers will chose the “legacy” approach and survive. We are happy to focus on the smart ones who understand what it will take to be relevant and competitive in the next five years.
Where does a reader get more information about Asia Tech?
Please visit our website, www.asiatechserv.net or contact me directly, Jean Garez at +65-9125-0872.
ArnoldIT Comment
ATS is one of those firms with the right people, the right knowledge, and the right servicers at a pivotal moment in time. For organizations in Asia, ATS can deliver solutions that work. For vendors wanting to penetrate the various, culturally distinct markets in Asia, ATS has the experience and connections to make market penetration easier and less risky. My suggestion is that readers of Beyond Search spend a few minutes familiarizing themselves with ATS’ capabilities. An inquiry to the firm may generate a substantial benefit.
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