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Introducing Our North American Partner Program

It’s an exciting time for Exalead and for search-based applications: we’ve launched our North American Partner Program.

Let’s take a step back for a second and look at what we have at Exalead. We have a  truly innovative technology and approach to search that enables better decision-making in businesses. We’ve built well received applications for our customers. And so far, the industry thinks we’re going in the right direction.

What’s more, given the current economy, partners are actively seeking innovative ways to differentiate their offerings and to help their customers stay one step (or many) ahead of the market by enabling quick and effective decision-making.

In short, it’s the perfect time to take our partner offerings to the next level. Through this Program, Exalead’s partners gain technology, marketing programs and joint selling opportunities to address the growing SBA market. And because the breadth of uses for SBAs is so broad, this Program helps us meet that demand.

The good news is that there are already more than 200 companies running CloudView SBAs with over 100 million unique users per month, so best practice examples abound. For instance, take a look at our partner The vdR Group, who uses Exalead to help engineering and manufacturing organizations locate specifications and designs for re-use in new projects.

We at Exalead are excited to continue to foster and grow a community of search-based application providers and to disseminate with new partners a major asset for easy and efficient search.

For more information on being a North American Exalead Partner, contact Ranjeet Vidwans, he’s our US partner liaison. For partners not based in North America who are interested in joining Exalead’s Partner program, contact Odile Mongheal.

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.

OK, so you won’t win a Wii by just saying hello, but you will have a chance to enter a random drawing for one by meeting with us at Enterprise Search Summit 2009 on May 12-13 in New York.
Stop by our booth number 28 to book an exclusive preview to our new Exalead CloudView offering and get a complimentary search needs assessment with Spencer Shearer, Exalead’s Senior Director of Technical Services. The assessment will include a detailed evaluation of your company’s enterprise search and information access needs.

Launched in September 2008, Cloudview™ is our new unified information access platform built on Exalead search technology. IDC calls our technology disruptive “because the company has moved aggressively from Web search to enterprise search, and now to information access…Exalead is one of only a handful of companies that have created new and better hybrid architecture to handle data as well as content.”

We’ll have a crew from Exalead on hand to show and tell you more about CloudView as well as how Exalead is helping create a new generation of smart, search-based applications that put data easily at your fingertips.

If you’re in New York, but not attending the conference, you can still meet with us at our private suite at the Hilton New York. Let us know in advance and we can reserve a time for you.

Editor’s Note: We often speak to some incredibly experienced and insightful people who are in the trenches in the information access space. When this happens, we like to ask them about trends they see in the marketplace. To this end, we will periodically publish their thoughts on this blog. As an example, we recently had a conversation with an experienced search professional employed at a Fortune 500 bank. We need to keep his name and employer a secret – but his observations are worth sharing.

People talk about the evolution of search (and search technology). Underlying those conversations is the evolution of the type of data that enterprises generate (from mostly structured to mostly unstructured) and where this data is coming from (from the database to … well … every source imaginable).

But there’s another interesting industry evolution worth examining: the shift in the use of specialized, expensive niche search technologies in the late 90s toward the broad, flexible powerful search platforms we see today.

In the late 90’s, many technologies focused on one task such as natural language query, adaptive pattern recognition, fuzzy logic or topic-specific glossary weighting. With the amount of the investment made into developing each of these technologies, a lot of us thought that the industry would trend toward small, niche providers whose solutions could be brought in-house and fine-tuned to fit the needs of the end-user enterprise.

But it wasn’t to be.

The cost of niche best-of-breed search products became prohibitive – which was a shame because the technologies had advanced so much. Building, utilizing and maintaining that infrastructure was just too expensive.

Today, however, we are seeing the broad information access providers like Exalead build much of that best-of-breed natural language query, adaptive pattern recognition, fuzzy logic and topic-specific glossary weighting technology into their search platforms. We are also seeing that these solutions are increasingly replacing older technologies — such as relational databases — at a lower cost.

As a result, the appeal of robust search solutions in the enterprise is growing quickly. It’s an exciting time to be in enterprise search – we are finally realizing the power and promise of many of the best-of-breed solutions we first saw a decade ago.

Customer contact centers and web-based self service outlets face a lot of challenges.

What’s one of the big ones? Providing quality customer service quickly – and at a low cost – even as the number of interactions per week soars to hundreds of thousands.

What’s another big one? Customer data is spread all over different file types – from applications like CRM, ERP, billing, etc. to emails and web forms to voice recordings – and moves through multiple communication channels and systems inside and outside the firewall.

Faced with such a high volume of archived and real time data, contact centers need effective search solutions to process, organize, and analyze that data and provide complete, contextual information to Reps in a single access point. Talk about mission critical — search is nothing less in an industry where customers expect fast results and individual attention regardless of the communication channel.

If this challenge hits close to home, on April 2, 2009 at 11 am PT come hear Richard Snow, VP and Director of Ventana Research and Maya Natarajan, Senior Director of Marketing at Exalead, discuss how effective search can help contact centers achieve organizational efficiency.

Learn about the ways in which search technologies can improve Rep performance at the desktop and Web-based self service:

- How new search-based information mash-ups provide a 360-degree view of customer interactions from both enterprise application and web data sources
- How businesses can integrate Web-based self service with Rep performance to give real-time indications about customer intentions and respond effectively, increasing customer satisfaction
- How simple search-style text queries shorten data look-up times but enable comprehensive dashboards that improve outcomes
- How this technology can really provide improved levels of customer service and experience at lower cost.

Register for the webinar entitled “Leverage Search to Improve Contact Center Performance” here

For the past two years, the promise of cloud computing has brought an intense interest in technologies that support large-scale, distributed computing models.

This excitement? Definitely warranted.

BusinessWeek technology writer Stephen Baker covered parallel computing technology Hadoop in December of 2007 in his story “The Two Flavors of Google”. Baker wrote “As more businesses and researchers shift complex data operations to clusters of computers known as clouds, the software that orchestrates that teamwork becomes increasingly vital.”

Hadoop and similar technologies are an important first phase of a computing evolution.

At Exalead, we developed our own computing framework for our web search engine (found today at Exalead.com/search). We call our parallel computing framework DSort. Exalead’s DSort technology, like Hadoop, distributes a computation over a large number of machines.

This scalability is appreciated by a number of clients. For example, France’s blogging platform, Skyblog, which ranks 16th on comScore’s list of most popular web sites in the world, manages 500 million blog entries and handles more than 20 million search requests daily.

The real excitement for Exalead, however, is the idea that we can combine this scalable architecture (in our case DSort) with a level of intelligence and information access functionality that most people haven’t seen before.

This is a major step towards the next big phase of computing.

As analysts from The 451 recently wrote, Exalead appears to be at a crossover point between search and BI. “The challenge with this idea is of course that for the past 30 years or so relational databases have been where the ‘important stuff’ has been stored and the multi-billion BI market grew on top of that as a way to access it.
Database administrators rule(d) the roost as far as information management goes. Meanwhile enterprise search got relegated to a side room where it was all about finding documents and getting pages and pages of results returned to you.

What..Exalead and a few other companies are moving towards is a convergence of the two; call it database offloading, unified information access; unified information intelligence or something similar.”

This means companies are creating mission critical business applications – apps that were impossible a few years ago — on our solution. These applications can scale to extraordinary levels at a fraction of the cost – and often times can accomplish more than traditional IT technologies.

Web-based Architecture Moves Into the Enterprise

One example: GEFCO, a €3.5 billion company which ranks among Europe’s leading transport and logistic firms, adopted Exalead CloudView for use in their new application: “Track and Trace.” The application offers powerful search functionality and up-to-the-minute information from an extremely large data set.

“Before we installed Exalead CloudView it could take a day to get the results of such a CPU-intensive query, by which time the information was out of date,” said Guillaume Rabier, Manager of Studies and Projects at GEFCO. “Now we get these answers almost instantly.”

“With Exalead we are using database off-loading to intelligently rationalize the use of our resource systems. By maintaining a separate index, fewer of the users’ queries run against the database itself. This in turn reduces the load on the database servers which generates results faster and produces greater IT efficiency.”

Hadoop is worth all of the excitement.

We think the direction that companies like Exalead are taking will be worth even more.

Since Exalead started as a web search company in 2000, we’ve gained insights into the kind of search system that users need to locate specific information across a complex set of media and data types on the web. Many online publishers are finding that standard built-in search solutions don’t fit the bill when success with readers and users depends in large part on the ease with which they can navigate through content within the website and beyond.

For instance, with the growth of video and audio as outlets for content on the web, advanced search is necessary to cull this data and make it readily available and integrated with more structured data types. In addition, users are joining the information creation process with social reviews and rankings, and online publishers need search that effectively tracks and analyzes these interactions.

Our customers have also found that highly scalable search architecture is important as the web is becoming increasingly interconnected in interesting ways. From the perspective of online publishers, there’s a great opportunity for “mash-ups” between data from the local site itself and internal databases, and useful contextual data from the web and outside applications.

On Thursday March 5th at 8:00am PT, Morgan Zimmermann, Exalead VP of Business Development, will continue our discussion about the business opportunities that advanced search presents to online publishers looking to do more with their content. Morgan will discuss how online publishers can:

- Regain complete control over their content and transform it into a long-term, organic, profitable business
- Achieve strategic independence from content aggregators and advertisers
- Secure brand positioning across a spectrum of innovative user experiences
- Use ‘mash up’ and Hybrid search to improve profitability

You can register for the webinar entitled “Online Publishers: Is Content the Only Key to Success?” here.

We recently had an interesting conversation with Rob Wiesenberg, CEO of Contegra Systems, which designs customized websites and user interfaces for online publishers. Exalead works with Contegra to integrate contextual, scalable search solutions into their web products. Rob is an industry guru when it comes to helping online publishers sell their content. He founded Contegra more than 20 years ago and over the past decade has helped hundreds of publishers design their sites in a way that maximizes profit.

In this video hosted on our website, we chatted with Rob about some of the key challenges online publishers face today, including:

- The need for tagging to improve search and highlight useful metadata

- The need to access information across many different data sources and file types

- Most importantly, the need for a search solution that is customizable to an intuitive user interface that promotes the publisher’s content

Rob says the best online publishers are looking for the kind of search solution that helps readers find information quickly and efficiently and keeps them coming back, turning content into revenue.

To learn more about Exalead’s embedded website search solutions and our other e-business offerings, please visit our website.

Also, on Thursday March 5^th at 8:00am PT, Morgan Zimmermann, Vice President, Business Development at Exalead, will join us for a webinar entitled “Online Publishers: Is Content the Only Key to Success?”

You can register for the webinar here.