Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

Exalead had a great month in January – we can sense we’re making some waves in the industry as we ramp up in the US. We’ll say more about our momentum in the upcoming weeks, but in addition to increased interest in our information access platform, a few well-respected industry experts have said a nice thing or two about us in the past few weeks:

- Leading search consultant Miles Kehoe wrote on his blog “Exalead CEO Paul Doscher…has certainly increased his company’s visibility in the US market in the last 6 months, and they seem to be gaining strength in both the OEM and direct sales channels.”

- Expert search analysts at the Gilbane Group said “We have seen companies like Exalead… gain on former leaders.”

- “Beyond Search” blogger and well known search consultant Steve Arnold wrote on us a few times in January talking about our strategy and momentum. On January 8 he wrote “I am on the record as a person who finds the Exalead engineering among the top tier in the search and content processing world.” He also conducted a QA with me in early January and threw in his 2 cents on our OEM product launch where he concluded “The company continues to make headway in the US market.”

- Exalead execs also spent some time talking to eWeek, FierceContent and others on our strategy moving forward.

But it wasn’t a perfect month. We had scheduled a webinar with Leslie Owens from Forrester in January, but we had a technical hiccup that forced us to reschedule.

We have rescheduled the webinar for this Friday, February 6 at 11 a.m. PT.

You can register here.

Over the past several months we’ve seen record interest in our information access platform CloudView.

We’ve also noticed an interesting trend. Increasingly, we’ve been approached by enterprises who are hoping to work with us (that’s not the interesting part) … and who are moving away from legacy enterprise search solutions such as Microsoft FAST and Autonomy.

Many FAST customers and prospects don’t like being forced to use Microsoft as their server infrastructure (Linux anyone?) and Autonomy users, especially OEM partners, are frustrated by Autonomy’s pricing structure. As Gartner reported :

“Autonomy’s opaque pricing model can irritate prospective customers, as they cannot predict what price the vendor will offer. Also, they often find its proposed price the highest of any they receive.”

And don’t get me started on our technical advantages.

With this sweeping shift away from older enterprise search products to newer, faster, more scalable information access platforms offered by vendors such as Exalead, we invited leading Forrester analyst Leslie Owens to come speak about how companies can migrate from the old to the new.

On Wednesday, January 21 Leslie will join us for a webinar entitled “Search Platform Migration: Mitigating Risk with Innovation” where she will discuss among other things:

- How enterprise search can expose a “messy, heterogeneous state of enterprise content”

- The driving needs of enterprise search users

- Key tips for evaluating your current solution and picking a new search solution.

Please join us and register for our webinar on January 21!

If you miss it, that’s ok –we’ll keep an audio version online and you can listen to it whenever you get the chance.

Heard something notable at the Butler Group Enterprise Search Strategy Briefing in late November.

A rep from Scotland’s National Health Service talked through a case study of their use of FAST and offered up some … interesting … metrics.

The customer indicated that they were anticipating growing their system from 11 million documents to 18 million documents … but that this growth would require 22 servers.  Considering that NHS employes a staff of roughly 150,000, and assuming all these staff run 10 searches a day for a maximum of … say … 16 hours per day, this is roughly 1 query per second.

This means FAST, for this implementation, needs 22 servers to run 1 query per second across 18 million docs. Without going into all the technical detail, this isn’t entirely surprising given FAST’s dependence on a slew of different technologies (which adds to the complexity of their deployment) and their need to distribute to more and more servers as the amount of content that needs to be located, searched and indexed grows (which presents a challenge for companies whose data pools are increasing …  i.e. all of them).

Just for the sake of comparison, Exalead customers get 20 queries per second across 20 million docs with only 1 server — less cumbersome, more efficient and greener than the 22 servers described by NHS.

Especially in this time of economic downturn and budget belt-tightening, it’s even more crucial that businesses get the most IT bang for their buck.   Make sure you make the right choice for your information access so you can utilize your important data and preserve your corporate resources.

Sue Feldman at IDC recently released a report that found that the search and discovery market grew to $1.8 billion in 2007. That’s a 28% growth rate last year…in a sluggish and slowing economy…and so far research has shown that the market has continued this trend into 2008. Also considering the software industry grew at between 4%-6%, that is a pretty amazing statistic.

What is even cooler and a lot more impressive is that Exalead grew at over 300% last year. This means that we’re not only growing much faster than the market but we’re also eating up our competitor’s market share, because, as Sue points out, Exalead provides simplified access to complex and varied content repositories.

The reason for both our company’s and the search market’s growth is simple: businesses realize that increasing visibility into new types of data sets – structured and unstructured, from all different sources inside and outside of the company — empowers better decision making.

Of course, as Sue points out, what underlies this all is the age-old business need to understand the customer. In modern times, the key to understanding the customer and customer needs lies in corporate data — documents, e-mails, CRM systems, etc. Customers communicate with their vendors/partners through multiple channels not just what shows up on the order form when there’s a purchase. Great information access systems use all of these repositories to give a 360 degree view of the customer relationship.

Exalead has been allowing businesses to unlock the door to customer satisfaction for years, and, just like the market we inhabit, we have no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

The concept of “cloud computing” has been getting a bad rap lately, with Richard Stallman and Larry Ellison weighing in heavily on the “anti” side.

It is true that “cloud computing” is nebulous in nature.

We at Exalead have our own view of the cloud, perhaps better termed the “enterprise content cloud.” It is a cold, hard truth that enterprises are generating more and more information and that this information is becoming disassociated from the businesses users who need to access it. Data exists…well…everywhere– on a slew of devices, behind the firewall and outside of the firewall– and it has become a challenge to not only access this data but to even find it to make effective business decisions. Given all of these different silos of information, it is no wonder that there is a rapidly expanding chasm between the business decision makers and the information they need. In fact, only 10% of executives report that information to make a decision is usually there as needed. The data is as far away and, sadly, as inaccessible as the clouds in the sky.

Taking a step back, this fracture between information and business decision makers within the enterprise can be extended to mirror the growing disassociation between the enterprise and meeting its computing needs. Stallman’s arguments against cloud computing are rooted in his open source zealotry, so there isn’t a whole lot to say to that in response. Ellison may feel that cloud computing is antithetical to what he has accomplished at Oracle and maybe feels as if he missed out on an opportunity to capitalize on a growing movement. Regardless, both pundits should pay attention to what Galen Gruman pointed out several months ago– sure, cloud computing is nebulous, but it is most clearly realized as a way to meet business needs without a lot of investment in new infrastructure, new employees, or new software.

On-demand computing represents a multi-billion dollar market that touches a variety of verticals and has an all-star line-up of players. If you look at the software companies that have had the most IPO success over the past few years, it has been on-demand companies– SalesForce.com, Taleo, RightNow, Omniture, and HireRight, to name a few. When you are faced with a juggernaut, you have to adapt to its presence, which often requires tagging it as a way of identifying what you are dealing with– and so, cloud computing was born.

Bad rap or not – cloud computing is very much a movement that is forcing new opportunities and challenges onto enterprise users.