Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

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.

…and we just got another!

EContent Magazine has named Exalead to the eighth annual EContent 100 “list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.” The judging team for the EContent 100, which consisted of 14 analysts, journalists and industry experts, examined a wide array of information access vendors across 12 categories.

Exalead was ranked in the “Search Engine & Technologies” category, but, of course, CloudView is much more than a pure search engine. It’s a platform for creating information applications that access structured and unstructured enterprise and Web information — it opens up the enterprise content cloud and makes navigable the murky sea of corporate data.

2008 has been a big year for us, and this recognition from EContent Magazine is a nice bit of icing on the corporate cake.

Are you trying to find an embedded search solution that meets your users’ needs and your specific application requirements?

Have you tried to embed search into your application, but found it difficult and expensive to customize and integrate?

Have you already embedded a solution only to find that it lacks the performance and functionality your customers are demanding?

Would you like to learn about how you can cost-effectively give your customers access to search that has been architected for ISVs, offers value-added features, and scales?

If so, we’d like to invite you to join our webinar, “12 Leading Insights on Embedded Search for ISVs.” Learn about:

• Major Market Trends for Embedded Search
• Key Challenges Facing ISVs with Embedded Search
• 5 Most Important Embedded Search Requirements
• What Works and What Doesn’t
• Overview of Exalead CloudView OEM Edition
Moderator
• Eric Rogge, Senior Director of Marketing, Exalead

Featured Speakers
• Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of OEM, Exalead
• Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

Date/Time
• Friday, December 5, 2008 at 11am PST

Registration:
To register for the webinar, please click here.

To download the Exalead whitepaper “The ISV Challenge: Satisfying the Demand for Better Search,”

View a brief video interview about the webinar with Miles Kehoe.

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.

Over the past few months Exalead has had interesting conversations with a number of leading analysts and pundits as we led up to our launch in the U.S this past week. Almost without fail, the analysts agreed that information access is being transformed into something new – and Exalead is one of the leading vendors adapting to the required changes.

On Tuesday the 23rd and Wednesday the 24th, Exalead exhibited (and was a sponsor) at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose, California. Organized by Information Today (which brings you KMWorld and eContent Magazine), the two-day conference highlighted the best and the brightest in the content management domain. Discussion abounded around the challenges that customers face as their structured and unstructured data pools expand and around the top content management issues that plague enterprises (diversity in data type and sources? Connectivity? Security? All of the above?).

And speaking of customers, our industry is filled with lots of unhappy ones. We plan to continue to use our experience (our executive and development teams include some of the leading search visionaries on the planet) and our technology to change this.

As testimony of this will, here is an interview by Peter Brooks-Johnson, a Product Director from Rightmove, UK’s number one property website that has recently implemented Exalead’s technology.

Upcoming: The 4th Annual CIO Strategies Europe conference takes place in Nice, September 22nd and 23rd.

A hundred CIOs and IT decision makers from prestigious European companies will participate in the event and share their experiences and their knowledge in workshops, case studies and interactive round tables.

Guillaume Mainbourg, Director General of Exalead, will close the morning of September 22 by leading a workshop entitled: “The next revolution: from traditional search to new hybrid business solutions.”

If you wish to learn more (agenda, particants…), do not hesitate to go on the site CIO Strategies Europe

We have spoken to you a lot about Charles Knight, known in the Search world for his blogs ReadWriteWeb and Altsearchengine.

On June 2, 2008 Altsearchengine blew out its first candle, and we are very proud to present our best wishes to Charles Knight and wish him much success.

Exalead has been working hard to make the features of our website accessible to anyone with an internet connection.  Search Specialist, Stephen Arnold, has been following Exalead for the past 2 years. He says, “Google is, except for Exalead, arguably the most sophisticated free Web search provider in the world.”

Click here to read the article.

Exalead has been part of the server revolution, providing faster and more efficient service over the years.

This is not the first time nor the last time you will hear about our server improvements. In fact, we will be providing regular updates to address the evolution of traffic, the increase in the number of indexed pages and our improvements in service.

Here is a brief summary of the stages that have affected the life of our production center.

To begin, Exalead installed some machines in the offices of our service providers. But considering our growth, it was necessary to give them dedicated homes that did not use our equipment.

March 2005: We installed the first dedicated room with the opening of our Site 1, consisting of more than 10 machines shared in more than 6 racks. Yes, they were big machines! This allowed us to index 1 billion pages.

August 2005: We added around 30 servers to address the traffic, with the capability of indexing more than 2 billion pages.

March 2006: Then things really heated up, and we opened a second site and added more than 50 servers (10 racks) that enabled us to index more than 8 billion pages.

January 2007: As a result of the abundance of services and ideas that leave our laboratories, we had to add more servers to Site 1.

2007 to Present: Our laboratories continue to work and prepare for an upgrade to enrich our architecture, improve speed, and become more robust and efficient. But we had to add 20 machines to Site 1 in august 2007.

Since then, we have been actively working to put these improvements on line, so you can see the evolution, but this is not the calm before the storm…

Phil Bradley, librarian’s librarian and noted search engine blogger, has published “10 Reasons Why Librarians Should Use Exalead.”

“It’s a search engine for people who like to use search engines, and it’s an engine for librarians. If you’ve not used it, I’d strongly recommend giving it a whirl next ‘Google free Wednesday’.”

Thank you, Phil, for the kind words about Exalead, and for furthering the web community’s knowledge about search engine technologies and alternative search engines.