Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

An Italian Exalead customer, CARIFE won the Innovation Award for the Web 2.0 and collaboration category.

The SMAU, a prominent Italian ICT Expo, particularly renowned for its attention to Innovation rewards the most forward-looking IT projects each year.

This year, Carife (Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara) caught the professional’s attention with its unified search service based on Exalead CloudView.

Exalead features allowed Calife employees to access relevant content more easily, share their knowledge and collaborate better: A single access point to more than 50 different information sources (mainly Lotus Notes), forward-looking navigation tools, an easy and fast implementation, and ability to respect security measures.

Congratulations to our Italian Team!

For more information, please consult the Carife client case

First of all, thanks to Bill Ives for his post about Exalead and Search-Based Applications (SBAs).

In my discussions with Bill and others, I’ve heard a consistent refrain that an essential element of SBAs is that they enable an immediate action as opposed to providing more content for research. As Bill points out in his post, there is a compelling business case for making decisions with speedy access to as much relevant data as possible. This is exactly what SBAs allow business users to do.

An illustrative example would be our partner, the vdR group, who is using Exalead CloudView OEM to create SBAs for engineering and manufacturing organizations. Their product, Partrieve, enables engineers to locate specifications and designs for re-use in new projects. Simply put, Partrieve empowers vdR’s customers to be more efficient, to lower manufacturing costs and, ultimately, to improve profitability. It’s not a big jump from this example to say that SBAs in general empower people (and, by extension, businesses) to do their work more efficiently and creatively…and isn’t this an essential cornerstone of search technology?

As with any tool, however, the trick is in making the right design decisions so that its strengths are in line with the needs it is built to address. Based on our experience with applications we’ve helped develop and deploy, we see three unique, SBA-specific categories of capability: Usability, Agility and Performance.

• Because SBAs generally serve thousands or even millions of users, they need to be immediately usable and useful, without requiring extensive training (read: without being a time suck).
• In today’s fluid, rapidly evolving world, SBAs need to be eminently adaptable to proprietary, changing business practices and to evolving information needs.
• Given the large amounts of information that are often sourced, the high activity of user communities and the need to constantly update information in real time, unwavering performance levels – at an affordable cost – is a critical must.

Though these broad requirements are consistent across businesses and industries, the specific needs of any given organization are unique and likely to change over time. This is why a “one-size-fits-all” approach to search is dangerous. In every industry, tools are the quintessential means of improving productivity, but these tools need to be specially designed and customizable to achieve tailored results and provide the desired and user-demanded differentiation. So, we think there will be a ‘long-tail’ of SBAs alongside general-purpose search tools from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft just as there are special purpose tools for producing today’s wide spectrum of products and materials.

The result is that every organization will be able to reap the decision-making benefits of an SBA that is right-sized to meet their needs.

The Spanish capital hosted some members of new elite technologies during Red Innova, the first forum on innovation and technology for Spanish  and Portuguese speaking markets.

This forum gathers Latin American Internet leaders and other Internet leaders interested in sharing their experiences, ideas and upcoming projects.

François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, made the trip and share roundtable on “Cloud computing & Information Access” with Tim Barker from SalesForce.com and Juan Tonda from Microsoft.

Here are some pictures for the curious!

One area where we’ve seen a lot of search-based business application traction lately is in e-discovery.

It makes total sense. e-discovery isn’t a business process where one can just use Google or Bing. It has a specific purpose, namely to favorably resolve litigation. And there are unique data challenges associated with e-discovery — exact enumeration, managing information privilege and establishing chains of events just for starters.

At the same time, the data management systems accessed during e-discovery often continue to support enterprise operations…meaning that data is continuously being added. This makes establishing a consistent and preserved evidentiary data set a challenge.

In short, e-discovery necessitates a way of searching data that is unique and special to that activity. Of course, the ability to customize the search parameters and relevancy can be crucial, given the different types of information that different organizations need to provide for different reasons. TJMaxx’s PCI compliance requirements are different from UCLA Medical Center’s HIPAA requirements, which are in turn different from the e-discovery requirements of any company unfortunate enough to be embroiled in a civil or criminal lawsuit. And let’s not forget that all of this needs to be done without breaking the bank.

Scalability? Cost-effectiveness? Accuracy? Data preservation?

Answer: search-based applications (SBAs)

But don’t take our word for it. Listen to our partners and customers.

Today we announced that  GWAVA has integrated Exalead CloudView into their Retain E-Mail Archiving Platform. Why? It was more scalable and customizable at a lower cost than their existing solution.

Messaging Architects is another example. They recognized the changes that new types of data (like e-mails) brought to the business of records management and needed a solution that could quickly search and index terabytes of content, no matter the language or source. And what solution did they choose? You guessed it – Exalead.

Just two examples of how SBAs can evolve to meet the changing needs of all enterprises.

With names like Wonder Wheel  and Bing xRank, it’s easy to see how someone can get caught up in the marketing fanfare of these recent technology announcements.

Fortunately, for our customers, these capabilities (and more) are already available to them.

For example, Miiget  is a technology that we’ve had since 2008 and is equivalent to Wonder Wheel in concept.

 www.tweepz.com was built using Exalead technology as a small evening project by an exalead consultant and is similar to xRank. 

But to be fair, Microsoft had to do something and Google had to respond (or preempt?). Yet, the battle isn’t just between Microsoft and Google, but between these two and other web businesses as well.

These new offerings raise the user experience bar for every business that depends upon web traffic. As a provider to these other businesses, we’re keenly aware of that. We have been from our beginning. That’s why customers such as Yakaz,  Hometrader, 118218, and Skyblog use our technology. To improve user experience and user traffic and, in some cases, dramatically so.

Exalead believes in the concept of the long tail. That is, not everyone is satisfied with services provided by Google and Microsoft. In fact we find many users rely on multiple search sites, each for a different purpose. It’s a best-of-breed idea. This makes sense to us, since the time taken to go to a specific site is negligible compared to the length of the conversation with the site. So why not go to the best?

At least that’s how we see it. So in support of our customers, Exalead will continue to lead search technology performance and innovation. Current work in the area of semantics for increased recall, precision and insight will enable our customers to be a step ahead of their competition and provide better information with less cost and effort.

80% of all banks and more than 50% of all the largest organizations use Lotus Notes/Domino as their primary email and collaboration environment. But the way that Notes applications are built – each with its own database – has been limiting to index and make the data searchable.

Enter Exalead. We’ve partnered up with IBM to tightly integrate our award-winning search offerings with a wide range of IBM products, starting with Lotus Notes/Domino. We’ve added Exalead CloudView and Exalead Desktop Search to Lotus Notes/Domino to index all shared data and make them searchable (even remote Notes databases stored on the Domino servers).

Lotus users can now execute a “key word search” – exactly as they currently do on Google, Yahoo, or MSN – and call up, in less than a second, all relevant emails, attachments, wikis, blogs, Twitter threads, and other repositories in a unified view from their Notes client. Strong security integration ensures that users can only access information they are entitled to see.

With Exalead integrated search in IBM applications, it doesn’t matter where information is stored, or if the data is “personal” or “shared.” Users find and see only what they are looking for quickly, reliably, and cost effectively.

Here’s how one company is already using Exalead in its Lotus environment.

A leading European-based global banking and financial services organization deploys Exalead CloudView on an internal IT help desk application that services all its employees across North America. Its team of help desk agents can now access the information it needs, quickly and easily, from a myriad of decentralized repositories.
The organization’s knowledgebase includes a fast-growing inventory of spreadsheets, Word documents, image files, PDFs, presentations and data scattered among more than ten Lotus Notes databases, Oracle, shared drives and the BMC Remedy ticketing system.
The bank has simplified and expedited information access for help desk agents, particularly within the BMC Remedy system, which is a structured database allowing users to enter their own tickets, check their status and handle change control.
Better search within the BMC Remedy system combined with access to Lotus Notes databases has delivered these results for the bank: Help desk tickets resolved in hours, not days; reduced call times; and an increase in first-call resolutions.

These benefits mean real savings for the bank. To help other organizations get started on this path, IBM and Exalead will be hosting a webinar later this month that covers the power of Exalead’s 360-degree view of information within and outside of Lotus environments.

Join us on June 25, 2009 at 11AM PST for this free webinar, “Next Gen Information Access for Lotus Notes: The 360° View.” We will also look at the evolution of information repositories, Web 2.0 architecture ROI, and how to create information mashups.
Lotus Notes/Domino is just the beginning. Look for more connectors for IBM brands such as WebSphere, DB2, Cognos, Quikr, Expeditr, and FileNet. Alternatively, Exalead Desktop Search  is available as a free download, so anyone can try it out today with no advertisements, no hidden tracking, no security holes or any other worries.