Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

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 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 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 innovative because their architecture allows IT organizations to economically enhance these processes beyond the status quo. More thoughts on this to come.

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.

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.

Exalead Smart Search for Travel And Leisure solutions

Frommer’s 2009¹ online travel experience survey found that “half of all travelers have struggled with poorly constructed, confusing and inaccurate websites that don’t provide them with sufficient images and information. The survey also showed that consumers were frustrated by technology-related issues such as slow downloads and broken links.”

Obviously, there is a lot of work to do making consumers’ online travel booking experiences better.

At Exalead, we see this as an opportunity for search-based applications.

Imagine if, instead of using a cumbersome search form, you could simply type “New York Giants January Home Game” and the search returned game ticket offers, associated promotions and advertising for travel, accommodation, dining and other relevant attractions.

Another example: Imagine if in the early stages of planning a scuba diving trip to Mexico, a search allowed you to see the best deals across many different Mexican resorts. In less than a second, Exalead creates navigational categories for the user to look at additional offers such as hotels that offer scuba certification, kid-friendly hotels, boat rentals, restaurant deals, spa packages, city guides or resort info.

This would significantly improve the consumer’s experience and at the same time add revenue for travel sites.

With Exalead’s Smart Search for Travel and Leisure solution, travel sites can present personalized, relevant ad placement that corresponds with a user’s stated profile as well as their site behavior. This improves conversion revenue, ad click- through revenue, and helps differentiate a travel site over its competitors.

How?

• Smart Search uses a user’s stated profile as well as relevant travel preferences through observing their behavior using Exalead’s Smart Search semantic processing and relevance profiling technology.
• Smart Search processes, profiles and presents relevant promotions, advertisements, supporting information and social network content by interpreting user profiles, user queries and web page views.

At Exalead, we believe activity-centered travel arrangements will be a major step forward in making researching and booking travel online much less frustrating for consumers.

For those of you who will be attending the PhocusWright Travel Innovation Summit November 17 in Orlando, please come by and see our demo!

It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 to 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I, for one, would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that involve their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation and negative sentiment and to bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more examples of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related Web sites or people.  The experiment is built upon our Web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.

Exalead is proud to announce that its ExaLabs Web application Voxalead News has been chosen as a finalist for this year’s Multimedia Grand Challenge in the category of Video Segmentation. This challenge is part of ACM Multimedia Conference, the biggest scientific conference on multimedia applications and will take place in Beijing between October 19th and 24th.

Voxalead News, previously known as Voxalead, is a Web application that enables you to search for text within videos so you can gain a wide panorama of what is said about a topic in the news. It uses a Speech-to-Text transcription module from LIMSI (IT Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, an entity of CNRS) to transcribe speeches.

As usual in this type of competition, there are many challengers. All categories included, there are 14 of finalists this year that will promote their application with a 3min-speech a the conference. Let’s encourage and wish good luck to Julien who will champion Voxalead News in Beijing!

Click here for the details of Yahoo’s Challenge on Video Segmentation and view the complete list of finalists.

By the way, don’t forget to try out Voxalead News at voxalead.labs.exalead.com !

Stay tuned…

At Exalead, we are now seeing uses for search-based applications (SBAs) across many different industry sectors and enterprise departments. SBAs that have been a hot bed for Exalead are customer service-oriented applications. Recent Exalead customers have implemented SBAs within Contact Centers and also for direct use by customers (customer self-service applications).

With that in mind, I recently came across a blog on the movement of customer service towards the use of social media. Linda Evans’ entry on “Customer Service in Social Media” in particular comes to mind. What really resonates with me is the importance of companies monitoring their name in the social media space in order to be fully engaged with their customer base. It seems that the underlying challenge is how to be fully tapped in. Indeed, having a customer service Twitter channel makes a lot of sense, as does a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But what about the next popular channel and the next … And, how in the context of customer service, does this get pulled together as a full and cohesive view of and conversation with the customer?

Well, yes, I do have an opinion on this, and now it’s even stronger.  To maintain a 360-degree view of the company as well as its customers and competitors, channel searching needs to be both adaptive and efficient. To be truly meaningful, the result of channel searching also needs to be up-to-date and presented in a unified fashion that makes sense. Search technologies are key to enabling a company’s customer service strategy and infrastructure to adaptively find, tap into and assimilate all sources of relevant information—including social media.

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.

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 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.