Author Archives: Eric

About Eric

Eric manages Exalead marketing for North America. He has over 20 years of experience developing and marketing enterprise and database software. Prior to Exalead, he co-founded Ventana Research and advised leading software vendors in the business intelligence and information management market. Eric has a BSEE from the University of California and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

  • Government Agencies Using Exalead to Improve Search in SharePoint

    October 25th, 2010 by Eric Powered by Exalead, Products 0

    At Exalead, we are excited about our continued momentum in the government sector. This momentum continues with our work with the famed U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (also known as CAC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. CAC is using Exalead CloudView as the search engine for documents in Microsoft SharePoint.

    CAC, as a major subordinate headquarters of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, has often been referred to as the “ Intellectual Center of the Army”. Since 1882, CAC and its predecessor organizations have been engaged in the primary mission of preparing the Army and its leaders for war.

    A critical part of CAC’s mission is to provide the U.S. Army easy access to tens of thousands of current documents, as well as documents dating back decades. CAC uses Microsoft SharePoint to enable collaboration to improve business processes – but wanted to improve the search engine functionality to improve productivity.

    Previously, CAC users could often spend hours looking for documents in SharePoint. With Exalead, these same documents can be found in minutes.

    CAC chose Exalead’s search-based application as its SharePoint search engine for several reasons including:
    - Faceted navigation improves speed and effectiveness of searches: Exalead’s easy-to-navigate user interface, especially the multi-faceted search, makes finding materials and information much faster by showing more relevant information and reducing the volume of false positives.
    - Certificate of Network Worthiness (CoN): Exalead is currently being evaluated for CoN, a requirement for all enterprise software products that operate in the Army Enterprise Infrastructure network. CoN certificates verify that software meets the highest standards for security, interoperability and sustainability. Exalead’s CoN tracking code is NETSUB-08454.
    - Multiple security controls and integration: CAC requires the utmost in security and found that Exalead search provides necessary flexibility to meet all the requirements, including integration with the Department of Defense Common Access Card (CAC) smart card CAC cards are issued as standard identification for active-duty military personnel, reserve personnel, civilian employees, other non-DoD government employees, state employees of the National Guard, and eligible contractor personnel.

  • Decoupling Information Access from Information Constraints

    June 30th, 2010 by Eric Kudos 0

    After a recent Exalead media event in Paris, Francois Bourdoncle and I were enjoying respective glasses of French wine and discussing search-based applications, a favorite topic. I asked him what aspect of the SBA vision was most compelling to him. His response was both interesting and expected. Expected because the answer was profound as is most of what Francois says. It was also interesting because of the implications. He said “the ability of search-based applications to decouple enterprise applications from usage was the most important aspect of SBAs.”

    So, what did he mean? Our challenge with accessing information today, as it has been for some decades, is that it resides across many different data management systems. Further, new data sources emerge constantly. The form of data can change as new elements are added to records, new content is added to web sites, new formats are imposed for office documents, etc. If we tightly bind our information access applications to these sources, such that the access system is intimately dependent upon the form of the underlying data, then accommodating new data or application/database migration projects incurs cascading costs and use disruptions. Further, we find that the life cycle of a core enterprise application is very long, multiple years, in fact, because of the expense and effort to deploy it. Yet, the lifecycle for information needs may be much different. Tactical activities may require access to certain information for only weeks or months. Or the need for information may be long term, but not aligned with the beginning or end use of an enterprise application.

    Hence, Francois’s vision for SBAs. The concept is to provide a flexible intermediate layer between information users and information sources that can accommodate conflicting requirements. Some capability examples that derive from the concept of decoupling:
    • Easily and quickly accommodate new data sources without disrupting ongoing use of the system
    • Support large scale user communities while accessing hundreds of terabytes of information
    • Relate and group different bits of information where no pre-existing common identifier key for joining data exists
    • Reducing information query response times while lowering the cost to process those queries
    • Provide a data integration system that accommodates not only record data from enterprise applications but also content from the Web (both 1.0 and 2.0).

    So by using a search-based architectural approach, we believe we can accommodate a broader range of seemingly conflicting requirements than we could otherwise. It sets IT and the user community free of the information access constraints imposed by large scale, though rigid enterprise applications.

  • Search and Collaboration

    June 18th, 2010 by Eric Powered by Exalead, Technology 0

    According to the Wikipedia: “Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.”

    An essential element of collaboration, at least in business, is providing information, know-how and ideas to the group. Clearly, providing the highest-quality information would be desirable. But, let’s assume that search technology wasn’t accessible for a moment. Say it was the year 1985. What information could one contribute? Likely it would be the information that was close to hand. So, the contents of one’s own files, plus those of colleagues, and perhaps information from a corporate, analyst or public library. Yep, those were the days. The impact on collaboration was significant. Off-line information collection time took days or weeks, so brainstorming, idea formation, evaluation and other collaboration tasks took time and were less well informed than now.

    So, let’s fast forward to 2010, 25 years later. With today’s search technology, not only do we have virtually any bit of available information at our fingertips, but our collaborative contributions are of significantly higher quality. We can contribute our own top-of-mind ideas and also the best-practices and innovations of others. And then provide supporting information that confirms hypotheses, fleshes out details and provides multiple viewpoints. With Exalead’s CloudView search technology, we can propose adjacent undiscovered, yet contextual information as well, effectively broadening the brainstorming bandwidth of the group. An interesting example is Wikifier.

    At  Dassault Systèmes, this notion of automation-enabled collaboration is a key concept. The vision is to allow the collective intelligence of a collaborative group to perceive, react and improve a joint project as represented by a body of information assembled with various automation tools like 3D and search technologies.

    An essential ingredient of the DS vision is the ‘at-hand-ness’ of the information. For example, 3D simulations allow us to inspect and evaluate physical objects virtually and conveniently at our desks. Similarly, semantic search technology retrieves and condenses information to shorten time to insights, opinions and decisions. So, an essential capability of next generation collaboration systems is the minimization of effort to get to information and views that are the most relevant and essential to a collaborative group’s goal. With this minimization of effort required to assemble information, information workers can focus on the creative elements of the collaboration. You’ll be seeing more of this as we continue to advance our search-based application platform.

  • Bringing Search and Business Intelligence Together

    May 6th, 2010 by Eric business intelligence 1

    There’s been some discussion within various BI and search tech circles recently about the use of search within Business Intelligence. It seems that the big question is how to knit the two together into a complimentary system. Earlier in the decade, Business Objects, Cognos and other BI firms acquired or built search UIs on top of their BI report and meta data repositories. So search on top of BI. More recently, other search technology vendors talk of having an ODBC interface (and support for SQL) so that BI tools can query search indexed data. So, this time, BI on top of search. In both cases, search is added to a preexisting core of classic BI technology.

    The challenge is that the notion of BI has mutated a bit from Howard Dresdner’s 1989 definition of Business Intelligence: “concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.” How so, you make ask. Over the last decade or so, BI innovation has been mostly about providing technology that allows business analysts and managers to gain access to business metrics – numeric data about various facets of a business. So, mostly clever ways to paint numbers onto a display as a report, view or dashboard, to speed the query and summation of numbers, to enable complex deterministic and even stochastic algorithms and to manage metric data (data warehouses).

    Yet, so often the difficult questions that managers and executives are attempting to answer are the ‘why’ questions. By their very nature, numbers can often obscure cause and effect relationships. Yet, these relationships are often the key to determining how to embrace an opportunity or counter a threat. Herein lays the value of unstructured information or, more precisely, descriptive text that gives insights into cause and effect and illuminates the nuance to relationships. Of course descriptive text often lacks that unique identifier that enables an RDB to join it to other data. This is where semantics and natural language processing can add value, by relating the cause and effect relationships embodied in unstructured data with quantified metrics in structured data. But this kind of matching isn’t an add-on to BI. It’s an activity that requires a different data processing approach, both during user queries and during data preparation. So, perhaps, rather than consider the idea of adding search to BI, an alternative approach yielding new, as-yet unrealized insight is to add BI to search. The concept is to define a set of structures that constitute important entities of a business – we call them business items. The quantitative metrics are added as attributes to that core set of entities, rather than vice versa.

    This is where we at Exalead see the next generation of business intelligence going. The idea is to identify business entities as the atomic elements of a virtual representation of a business. Then search and semantics technology can be used to describe the state of and relationships between these entities, including the user of quantitative metrics in those descriptions. In this manner, executives can view their data as they view their businesses – as a collection of valuable relationships with cause and effect implicit in the descriptions.

  • NewspaperARCHIVE evaluates Hadoop/Solr – decides to go with Exalead

    March 31st, 2010 by Eric Kudos 2

    Recently, Exalead made an announcement, “NewspaperARCHIVE.com Scales with Exalead” regarding one of our newest clients, NewspaperARCHIVE.com.

    We mentioned in the press release that NewspaperARCHIVE.com set out to replace Autonomy search – and that they looked at a number of alternatives, including at open source search software Solr.

    What we didn’t mention in the press release is that NewspaperARCHIVE also evaluated a combination of Solr and Hadoop before purchasing an Exalead license.

    A few facts about that Solr/Hadoop evaluation that we didn’t mention in the press release:

    - The NewspaperArchive database contains of just over 100 million newspaper pages, each averaging about 6,000 words – a total of roughly 600 billion terms or 2 TBs of text.

    - NewspaperArchive already owned a number of midrange servers (HP ProLiant DL300 Servers).

    - NewspaperArchive decided that the only way SOLR/Hadoop would work better if they purchased a large number of new commodity servers to run SOLR/Hadoop.

    - With Exalead, NewspaperARCHIVE was able to produce more efficient results on the existing server farm.

    How so, you may ask. Well, Exalead built a distributed computation layer equivalent to Hadoop/map-reduce for our web search engine. We call it dSort. For NewspaperARCHIVE, Exalead’s dSort technology accomplished everything SOLR/Hadoop did have in terms of distributed computing – but managed it more efficiently. And more importantly, Exalead’s built in semantic processing capabilities assured that customers of NewspaperARCHIVE would significantly more relevant results. In my conversations with the NewspaperARCHIVE team, they’ve said they’re very happy. And so are we.

  • When customer self service transcends knowledge bases

    by Eric Kudos 0

    A distinguished Gartner Analyst, Michael Maoz, recently published a paper titled “A Framework for Creating the Future of Customer Centric Web.” In that paper, Michael asserted that for many organizations, “IT professionals are struggling to create holistic, convenient web sites.” He then cites Amazon and Facebook as benchmarks for consumer expectations. For example, if one analyzes an Amazon page for a specific book, one finds information that:
    1) Attracts one to read more on the page about the book
    2) Provides pre-sales information such as descriptions, ratings, comments and reviews
    3) Enables one to purchase the book
    4) Allows one to comment on the book (presumably once purchased)

    In short, all phases of the customer life cycle are represented on one page. From an enterprise perspective, the interests of marketing, sales, finance and customer support are all represented on one web page. At the same time. Now let’s juxtapose this thought with how various enterprise software markets have evolved. Rationally, businesses have focused on specific business processes to automate as they acquired automation software. In turn, specific software markets and products have formed for sales automation, marketing enablement, e-commerce and customer service (among others). Yet, with the move by business to the Web , and with examples like Amazon, the notion of separate web applications (and accompanying data sets) are now perceived by customers as artificial and even sub-standard.

    Of course, purchase cycles for books and similar things often occur within minutes, so having the entire cycle represented in one page makes sense. On the other hand, business-sized purchases of software, services and material occur at a much slower pace. Nevertheless, the standard for efficiently enabling purchase cycles has been set in the consumer world.

    This new customer experience standard means that post-sales knowledge bases are necessary but not sufficient. Customers now expect to access many different types of information relating to different elements of the purchase cycle that cannot be managed realistically by a KM system. Examples of data which will likely be distributed across multiple data systems are past transactions, comments/opinions mined from the web, incident tickets, and social media content. In fact, many of Exalead customers do exactly this – they have distributed data systems over which they layer an access system that allows query-time integration of information to accommodate multiple stages of the sales cycle in one view or web page.

  • SFA automation – What about the relationship?

    March 27th, 2010 by Eric customer relationship management 0

    As a student of CRM, I spend time reading research about CRM and recently came across a SFA (sales force automation) buyer’s guide. I was very interested in this document as I thought it would list key elements of SFA as a sub category for CRM. Notably, the document claimed that marketing plus SFA equaled CRM. Here’s what was listed as basic requirements:

    Lead tracking, e-mail tracking, scheduling and a database store this information

    Then, as advanced requirements, the guide listed:

    PDA support, sales workflow, prospect manager, contract manager, contact manager, lead capture, quote generation, web 2.0 support, call center integration, order management, territory management, profitability analysis, sales training and pipeline analysis.

    Again, I am a student of the CRM process. So I raise my hand and ask: where in this collection of capabilities does one account for our post-sales relationships with our customers? After all, aren’t our current customers are best future customers? What about:

    Deployment success of past purchases, solution value to the customer, post-deployment uptake by the customer’s users, handling on-going customer requests for new capabilities, tracking alignment of customer business objectives and vendor roadmaps, etc.?

    Does marketing do this on a customer-by-customer basis? Not that I’ve seen. And support is usually focused on fixing problems. So, how does this information get capture and accessed?

    At Exalead, we find an increasing number of customers asking us to provide a 360 degree view of their customers to their sales people, support teams, management and other stakeholders. Why? Because they need to have a complete picture of the customer relationship. And, that means integrating data not held in SFA systems. That data could be transactional information, customer support incidents, tracking of internal projects or work on behalf of customers, inventory availability and location, customer feedback from forums, etc. Our customers tell us the business case for this is simple: more business! With increased understanding of our customers, we don’t just push our products, but help them increase their business. And that is a very exciting relationship to have with customers.

  • Search-based applications and business processes

    March 17th, 2010 by Eric Kudos 0

    The value of any new technology category is often hard to forecast as that technology is born. Certainly when powered aviation initially ‘took-off’ (pun intended), its pioneers, Félix du Temple de la Croix, the Wright brothers and others were a small group of visionaries. These few visionaries believed in the possibility or even the certainty of commercial aviation. Others were less convinced. This scenario for new technologies has repeated itself many times.

    Search-based applications (SBAs), as a software technology concept, has had a similar reception. But we still have many use cases yet to be explored. At Exalead, we view SBAs as a natural evolution beyond generic search technologies. The drivers are organic, as both vendors and customers conceive innovative use cases for our technology to enhance commerce, government and our personal lives.

    As we explore uses for  search-based applications, it’s important that we articulate the business value of SBAs for each anticipated use. The good news is that for each Exalead SBA deployment so far, there are specific business processes that have been enhanced. Examples of those enhancements are shorter cycle times for specific tasks, uniform deployment of process best-practices, enhanced vendor value to customers, reduced business process support/training costs and increased productivity.

    Examples of business processes that have gained these advantages are cross- and up-selling by inside and outside salespeople, sales proposal optimization, sales rep activity oversight, in-store/phone/on-line customer service, pre-purchase product location, recommendation and education, social community enrichment and consultant selection/team building.

    It’s very likely that in the early days of commercial air travel, there were those who questioned “who needs it?” thinking that trans-oceanic ship-based travel was sufficient and even more prudent. After all, it’s just travel from point A to point B, right? And likely lots of drinks on the observation deck.  Nevertheless, minimal time (and cost) spent traveling was and is a need for many people.  Similarly, our customers tell us that incremental improvement in sales, customer service and employee productivity are ever present needs for business that endorse the adoption of SBAs.

    My point is that search-based applications are a new approach to accelerating and enhancing existing business processes. They are innovative because their architecture allows IT organizations to economically enhance these processes beyond the status quo. More thoughts on this to come.

  • Join us at ILM:09 in Los Angeles

    December 8th, 2009 by Eric Kudos 1

    Even though the year is coming to a close, we are ending things with a bang at Exalead. Feedback we get from prospects, partners and media continue to mount for our search based application strategies.

    This week, we are joining executives from Twitter, MSNBC, Facebook, Local.com and eLocal at BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media 2009 (ILM:09) at the beautiful and historic Hyatt Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Exalead and its partners will no doubt be in the conversations and the buzz around the rapid innovation in local online search.

    In addition, our year of accolades continues. The most recent recognition comes from eContent Magazine, which acknowledged our search based application strategy by including us in the 2009-2010 EContent 100 List in the December issue.

    Thanks to eContent Magazine and we look forward to great conversations at ILM.

  • Current Market for Customer Self Service

    November 20th, 2009 by Eric Kudos 2

    A quick shout out to Tracey Skinner of Waterfield Technologies who was kind enough to spend some time discussing her thoughts and experiences around Customer Service, and in particular Self Service. After following discussions with Exalead customers and trudging through countless articles and reports on the topic, it was interesting to get insight from someone who provides integration services and customer service solutions to clients of all industries and sizes.

    First, I wanted to get an insiders perspective on the state of adoption of new software technologies. “We’re not seeing a lot of companies making expenditures on new suites or replacement technologies versus making what they have better.” Tracy went on to echo what we’re hearing from Exalead customers: call centers are filled with archaic legacy systems that don’t cooperate with each other and the biggest challenge to date is tying all these systems together in cost-efficient ways to improve the effectiveness of their communications with and services for their customers. Budgets are so tight that companies are being more creative than ever to get existing systems to work better. “It requires a compelling ROI pitch in order to bring in technologies that require licensing.”

    With respect to the state of self-service, Tracy said Waterfield is seeing a dramatic increase in interest for self-service portals with many clients either discussing, in process, or evaluating solutions. However the implementation of self-service portals and similar systems is impeded by economics. Despite this, Tracy is hearing, from her clients, a strong resolve to make advances in 2010. This is encouraging to hear, but it seems the previously sited data integration challenges could directly impact the quality and effectiveness of a self-service solution. Tracy admits she is not sure people fully understand the impact of data integration and need to look at fundamentals first before slapping a web UI on-top. “When IT starts drilling in, they begin understanding other expenditures and tend to balk.”

    Given Exalead’s own experiences, a search-based approach can be used to address the customer service data integration challenges and still provide a compelling ROI. With this approach, a search engine indexes content from any source(s) desired: databases, file servers, content management systems, email servers, the Web, etc. Whatever the number or type of resources indexed, the result is a single structured data layer that can be directly queried by users, or tapped by other applications using standard Web formats and protocols. This eliminates costly and complicated integrations on the backend, providing unified access for all Customer Service reps and customers to all the appropriate structured and unstructured data inside and outside the firewall regardless of the source.

    Beyond the integration of information, the search-based approach provides other advantages, further improving the success and effectiveness of a self-service solution. More on that in the future.

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