Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

Over the past few months Exalead has had interesting conversations with a number of leading analysts and pundits as we led up to our launch in the U.S this past week. Almost without fail, the analysts agreed that information access is being transformed into something new - and Exalead is one of the leading vendors adapting to the required changes.

On Tuesday the 23rd and Wednesday the 24th, Exalead exhibited (and was a sponsor) at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose, California. Organized by Information Today (which brings you KMWorld and eContent Magazine), the two-day conference highlighted the best and the brightest in the content management domain. Discussion abounded around the challenges that customers face as their structured and unstructured data pools expand and around the top content management issues that plague enterprises (diversity in data type and sources? Connectivity? Security? All of the above?).

And speaking of customers, our industry is filled with lots of unhappy ones. We plan to continue to use our experience (our executive and development teams include some of the leading search visionaries on the planet) and our technology to change this.

As testimony of this will, here is an interview by Peter Brooks-Johnson, a Product Director from Rightmove, UK’s number one property website that has recently implemented Exalead’s technology.

And by cat, I mean our North American expansion and our new product line CloudView .
In June, we appointed Paul Doscher (former CEO of open source BI leader Jaspersoft) our North American CEO.

Tuesday 23 at the Enterprise Search Summit West, Exalead announced the CloudView family of products. Available in Q4 of 2008, this family includes Cloudview OEM, Cloudview Search and Cloudview desktop.

Drowning in data…

Data exists locally on a variety of devices, behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems and outside the firewall with SaaS applications and on the Web. That’s a whole lot of data from a whole lot of different sources. Peering into this enterprise content cloud is hard work for companies that need to be able to bring together a veritable mountain of unstructured and structured data and make it actionable for faster business decisions.

Bottom line: this content cloud has created the demand across all industries for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. Being able to expand their view into various data sources (and into structured and unstructured data) in a way that brings meaningful context and understanding (i.e. not data in a vacuum) equates to an enormous competitive advantages for any enterprise.

Of course, this requires a platform that can do several things: handle a huge amount of data, scale as the company and data pool grows and changes, and allow flexibility in customizing the solution for specific industries. The old guard search tools simply aren’t cutting it anymore in this evolving space.

170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month means that we here at Exalead have a clear view of the emerging issues that face enterprise customers. Or perhaps put differently, we have a Cloud-y View of what companies need to stay afloat through the next wave of information access challenges.

Exalead Image Search has just received a major update: a new user interface and 2 billion images.

The brand new Exalead Image Search stands out for its freshness (you’ll find images from the news), and its user interface that is both simple and efficient.

With Exalead Image Search:

• save images on your hard drive in a single click
• organize your Favorite Images your way
• leverage your wide screen, the number of search results adapts to the biggest resolutions
• refine your search in a click, to search only faces for instance

Exalead Image Search offers an extremely clear view of your search results: only thumbnails and sizes are displayed. Detailed information appears when your mouse hovers a thumbnail.

The right column (a.k.a Zapette) is gone, giving even more space to search results. Refinement features are displayed upon focus of the search input field.

Try Exalead Image Search and drop your feedback.

Ok. Two facts of life in the enterprise search space:

1) 82% of the market is frustrated with their existing search solution.

2) Catchphrases abound in this space. Attivio’s got “active intelligence.” Autonomy’s got “meaning based computing.” Every search vendor is clamoring for a slice of the enterprise search pie and working to differentiate themselves with words.

But put these two facts together, and it creates an interesting question: is there enough support behind the catchphrases to satisfy customers?

We learn what is most important in terms of product features and functionality from our customers:

- the need to easily navigate around their internal and external data for business decisions
- the need to scale to accommodate large volumes of unstructured and structured data
- the need to customize the way data is archived and tapped into to allow for maximized search efficiency

Especially as the cloud becomes more and more integral to data search, to stay relevant and up-to-speed, search vendors will need to develop search platforms that can scale for these new paradigms of information access. Kenneth Oestriech put it best <http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/652486> when he posted on his blog about external cloud-like architectures making their way into the enterprise and revolutionizing the way that the internal IT infrastructure is handled.

Given the level of dissatisfaction that seems to plague the market, and given that leading organizations want search tools that offer greater scalability and performance to reflect both the changes in how data is stored and the sheer amount of data that exists within most enterprises, it seems that all enterprise search vendors should think carefully about the legs on which their catchphrases stand. Does the product that holds up the image reflect changes in the market and the needs of customers?

Just a little food for thought…

Upcoming: The 4th Annual CIO Strategies Europe conference takes place in Nice, September 22nd and 23rd.

A hundred CIOs and IT decision makers from prestigious European companies will participate in the event and share their experiences and their knowledge in workshops, case studies and interactive round tables.

Guillaume Mainbourg, Director General of Exalead, will close the morning of September 22 by leading a workshop entitled: “The next revolution: from traditional search to new hybrid business solutions.”

If you wish to learn more (agenda, particants…), do not hesitate to go on the site CIO Strategies Europe

Each year, KMWorld, the famous American magazine specialized in Knowledge Management, is charged with the mission of selecting products and software on the cutting edge. Every year, Exalead’s performance captures the attention of KMWorld’s professionals with its unified search platform that is capable of easily and intelligently handling all types of research -on your PC, the Web and enterprise servers- in any data format.

“For the third consecutive year, Exalead’s solution has impressed us with its rapid and efficient search and by its precise refinement of results. Their innovative search approach is a real added value for their clients and makes our experts take notice, watching them year after year,” comments Hugh McKellar, editor-in-chief of KMWorld.

Our motivation is at a maximum during the fall, which is full of new product announcements and events.

To see the complete list of “KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Products of the year,” Click here.