Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

In his latest blog post (European Search Vendor Round Up, September 16, 2009), search expert Stephen Arnold names Exalead as one of the search industry’s most dynamic companies in Europe. It is a welcome recognition from a veteran search analyst who consistently provides technical and financial analysis of actual customer implementations in his research.

Steve makes a very good point, too, concerning the importance of product testing. While expensive to do, we appreciate Steve’s approach of hands-on work with the software products he advocates. There’s nothing like real data to prove a point. Thanks, Steve.

The O’Reilly Team’s Velocity ‘09 conference was held June 22-24 in San Jose, California.

Several ‘Web celebrities’ spoke about Cloud Computing, a theme picked up by some lesser-known gurus as well.

That is the case of Jeremie, an R&D Engineer at Exalead, who was chosen as a speaker for an Ignite session.

What is an Ignite session? It’s a session in which each speaker has 5 minutes to talk about a technical Web-related issue, with 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds -  before an audience composed of fellow “geeks,” of course.

Jeremie thus spoke for 5 minutes on a trendy topic in data storage solutions: “key value stores”. This data storage system appears to be more efficient than traditional relational database management systems, but it is also more simplistic. According to Jeremie’s point of view, one should be vigilant regarding the immaturity of some of these solutions. Moreover, they make data cross-referencing more complicated, and they cannot be used for every type of application. These simple tools have been created for very specific needs (e.g., there are key value stores in Exalead’s low index layers).

Here is Jeremie’s session at Ignite Velocity 09:

Why is choosing a company name with care so important?

Because choosing a company name with care means going beyond simple marketing concerns…

To age well, a name should speak to a company’s unique DNA and not today’s hot trend.

To stand out within the frenzied mass of today’s Internet, a name must also be both distinct and instantly recognizable. Confusion is the enemy of a strong brand.

We strove to ensure Exalead would reflect us uniquely and accurately: both what we were yesterday, and what we will be tomorrow.

Thank you, Steve Arnold, for a helpful reminder to us all of the importance of choosing a name with care…

Read Steve Arnold’s blog entry on ArnoldIT

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.

One of the world’s largest social networks uses Exalead CloudView to power innovative search across millions of images, videos and blogs, capitalizing on a stunning wealth of user-generated content. Skyrock General Manager Franck Cheneau explains…

Watch the video!

Our friends from the well known site Pandia have pushed the button very far with their April 1st posting.

In case you have doubts, we have not had private meetings with Serge Brin (we would be very honored) and Exalead continues to develop worldwide in an independent manner, increasing signatures, innovating daily with our clients. Thanks to the readers of this blog for supporting us with so much energy.

Greetings to Per and Suzanne who have supported us for several years, our revenge would be sweet.

On behalf of Exalead and its frog-eating poets.

PS: Between us, we have heard that some of our competitors were using this info to counter us at prospects and customers. The masks fall

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.

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.

The Company Plantronics launched a contest to find a new and more appropriate term to define people that work beyond the office.

The jury of 7 bloggers had an intense debate to chose 10 “finalists” from more than 500 submissions. Final terms were submitted to public vote for two weeks.

After more than 2200 votes cast, the word that now replaces ‘telecommuter’ is ‘cloudworker’. According to the winning submission, “a cloudworker is somebody who uses on-demand technology and collaboration tools, such as unified communications, to work anywhere and anytime, and uses the resulting freedom to enable a my-size-fits-me career path and lifestyle”.

And coincidentally, Exalead’s CloudView product range fits in perfectly with this concept!

Source

Discover Exalead CloudView

Stephen E. Arnold, a famous analyst in the online search engine field came to our French offices last February to interview François Bourdoncle.

A few months later, he came back to our Madeleine headquarters and granted us a video interview.

He tells us about his vision of the enterprise search market – the new study he wrote for The Gilbane Group ‘Beyond Search : What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work’ has just been released. He also shares his opinion about two ExaLabs projects he tested. The first one is Voxalead (available at http://voxalead.labs.exalead.com) which is a demonstration of the Speech-To-Text technology born from the collaboration between Exalead and LIMSI (Informatics Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineer Sciences).

The second demo is an occasion for you to discover an unrealeased search project called Restminer. Focused on New York Restaurants, Restminer gives the user structured information extracted from the unstructured web -dedicated press, blog posts, restaurant reviews, directories data…- with relevant tips such as sentiments analysis coming from different sources.

Here is the whole interview.

Exalead thanks Stephen Arnold for making himself available and being so professional !

Stephen Arnold’s Website : http://arnoldit.com/
Stephen Arnold’s Weblog : http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/