Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

Eurosoftware100 has published its 2009 list of the top 100 French software publishers.  Eurosoftware100 is a European ranking system and series of indices for the software industry managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Due to an 80% revenue increase in 2008, Exalead jumped ahead 30 places in the ranking within one year (from 95^th place in 2008 to 64^th place today) — a leap we are very proud of!

It’s official! Exalead’s Voxalead News video search has been named “Most Practical” Innovation in ACM’s Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009.

An innovation produced by Exalead’s Exalabs research laboratory, Voxalead News lets you search for keywords inside videos, rather than simply searching limited external information like titles or descriptions. A tremendous timesaver, Voxalead further lets you jump right to the point in the video in which your search term is used! The Voxalead demonstration currently offers search in four languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic) across a select set of news sources.

In addition to captivating news aficionados, this ‘most practical’ innovation is capturing the attention of business professionals in sectors such as Media, Publishing, eDiscovery, Competitive Intelligence, and Social Networking and Content Sharing.

For more information, visit the Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009 Web page. You can also test drive Voxalead News and other Exalead innovations at the Exalabs site.

After being nominated for the past four consecutive years as one of KMWorld’s Trend Setting Products, Exalead Cloudview™ has made the final list yet again.

The judging panel was composed of editorial members at KMWorld, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users. They assessed more than 800 products and selected those demonstrating visible technology breakthroughs that fulfill the challenges and needs of both vendors and customers.

The complete list of award winners will be featured in the KMWorld’s September 2009 issue and then in its online version.

About KMWorld
KMWorld is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market. The publication covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management by informing its more than 50,000 subscribers about the components and processes, and subsequent success stories that together offer solutions to improve business performance.  KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

Last April, Exalead paved the road towards innovation by becoming the Entrepreneurial partner of the Erasmus Mundus European project, a co-operation and mobility program which promotes Research and Development in the European Union.

Exalead has backed the creation of a new Master’s Program in “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” (EMM-DMKM).  According to MIT’s analysts, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery have been recognized as emerging technologies that will change the world.

Students from all over the world who have a Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics or Statistics could be enrolled in the Master’s Program from September 2010, in 6 different universities located in 4 countries: France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Lyon 2, Polytech’Nantes graduate school of engineering), Italy (the University of West Piedmont, Turin), Romania (The Polytehnica University of Bucharest), and Spain (the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona).

The Master’s program is very unique because the courses are both devoted to Marketing and also to Development with courses like Human/Computer Interfaces or Web/Social Networks/Association/Text/Multimedia Mining.

The program has been selected and awarded by the European Committee, and it’s recognized and certified EMM-DMKM as a Master of Excellence at the European level.  It will remain a unique Erasmus Mundus program in Europe focused on the topic of “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” and specific funding and scholarships will be assigned to the best “non-European” students who apply to the Master’s Program.

For those who want more information about the Master’s Program in  Data Mining and Knowledge Management, it’s here.

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.

80% of all banks and more than 50% of all the largest organizations use Lotus Notes/Domino as their primary email and collaboration environment. But the way that Notes applications are built – each with its own database – has been limiting to index and make the data searchable.

Enter Exalead. We’ve partnered up with IBM to tightly integrate our award-winning search offerings with a wide range of IBM products, starting with Lotus Notes/Domino. We’ve added Exalead CloudView and Exalead Desktop Search to Lotus Notes/Domino to index all shared data and make them searchable (even remote Notes databases stored on the Domino servers).

Lotus users can now execute a “key word search” – exactly as they currently do on Google, Yahoo, or MSN – and call up, in less than a second, all relevant emails, attachments, wikis, blogs, Twitter threads, and other repositories in a unified view from their Notes client. Strong security integration ensures that users can only access information they are entitled to see.

With Exalead integrated search in IBM applications, it doesn’t matter where information is stored, or if the data is “personal” or “shared.” Users find and see only what they are looking for quickly, reliably, and cost effectively.

Here’s how one company is already using Exalead in its Lotus environment.

A leading European-based global banking and financial services organization deploys Exalead CloudView on an internal IT help desk application that services all its employees across North America. Its team of help desk agents can now access the information it needs, quickly and easily, from a myriad of decentralized repositories.
The organization’s knowledgebase includes a fast-growing inventory of spreadsheets, Word documents, image files, PDFs, presentations and data scattered among more than ten Lotus Notes databases, Oracle, shared drives and the BMC Remedy ticketing system.
The bank has simplified and expedited information access for help desk agents, particularly within the BMC Remedy system, which is a structured database allowing users to enter their own tickets, check their status and handle change control.
Better search within the BMC Remedy system combined with access to Lotus Notes databases has delivered these results for the bank: Help desk tickets resolved in hours, not days; reduced call times; and an increase in first-call resolutions.

These benefits mean real savings for the bank. To help other organizations get started on this path, IBM and Exalead will be hosting a webinar later this month that covers the power of Exalead’s 360-degree view of information within and outside of Lotus environments.

Join us on June 25, 2009 at 11AM PST for this free webinar, “Next Gen Information Access for Lotus Notes: The 360° View.” We will also look at the evolution of information repositories, Web 2.0 architecture ROI, and how to create information mashups.
Lotus Notes/Domino is just the beginning. Look for more connectors for IBM brands such as WebSphere, DB2, Cognos, Quikr, Expeditr, and FileNet. Alternatively, Exalead Desktop Search  is available as a free download, so anyone can try it out today with no advertisements, no hidden tracking, no security holes or any other worries.

We are glad to announce that Mike Hobson has joined Exalead as Sales Director for the UK and Ireland.

Prior to coming on board, Mike was the UK Sales Director at Autonomy. Mike is responsible for overall business in the region with a special focus on partnerships. He has over 18 years experience in sales and sales leadership roles working for leading software companies including Autonomy, Verity, Information Builders and Interleaf.

We wish him good luck in his new role!

On April 6th, CIO, LeMondeInformatique.fr and IT NEWS INFO’s ceremony for Enterprise and Business Trophies for Information 2009 was held.

We are very proud to announce that GEFCO has won the CIO-online.com trophy: “Grand Prize and Innovation Trophy” thanks to its new vehicle track & trace service built on Exalead CloudView’s platform.

The Innovation Trophy awards efficient and effective audacity; the Grand Prize awards a particularly relevant and complete IT strategy that services the organization that installed it. With 2 of the most prestigious prizes, GEFCO is the big winner of the night.

This critical application for GEFCO’s business, conceived with the ST Groupe, constitutes one of the first major SBA applications (Search Based Applications) from Exalead. This prize bestowed by Chief Information Officers from the biggest companies, awarded both GEFCO’s choice of innovation and Exalead’s vision that has promoted the use of Index type technologies to construct business applications for several years, like operational reporting, with a guaranteed return on investment.

More information about this award >>

More information about the GEFCO case study >>

And a bonus, images from the event!

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

For the past two years, the promise of cloud computing has brought an intense interest in technologies that support large-scale, distributed computing models.

This excitement? Definitely warranted.

BusinessWeek technology writer Stephen Baker covered parallel computing technology Hadoop in December of 2007 in his story “The Two Flavors of Google”. Baker wrote “As more businesses and researchers shift complex data operations to clusters of computers known as clouds, the software that orchestrates that teamwork becomes increasingly vital.”

Hadoop and similar technologies are an important first phase of a computing evolution.

At Exalead, we developed our own computing framework for our web search engine (found today at Exalead.com/search). We call our parallel computing framework DSort. Exalead’s DSort technology, like Hadoop, distributes a computation over a large number of machines.

This scalability is appreciated by a number of clients. For example, France’s blogging platform, Skyblog, which ranks 16th on comScore’s list of most popular web sites in the world, manages 500 million blog entries and handles more than 20 million search requests daily.

The real excitement for Exalead, however, is the idea that we can combine this scalable architecture (in our case DSort) with a level of intelligence and information access functionality that most people haven’t seen before.

This is a major step towards the next big phase of computing.

As analysts from The 451 recently wrote, Exalead appears to be at a crossover point between search and BI. “The challenge with this idea is of course that for the past 30 years or so relational databases have been where the ‘important stuff’ has been stored and the multi-billion BI market grew on top of that as a way to access it.
Database administrators rule(d) the roost as far as information management goes. Meanwhile enterprise search got relegated to a side room where it was all about finding documents and getting pages and pages of results returned to you.

What..Exalead and a few other companies are moving towards is a convergence of the two; call it database offloading, unified information access; unified information intelligence or something similar.”

This means companies are creating mission critical business applications – apps that were impossible a few years ago — on our solution. These applications can scale to extraordinary levels at a fraction of the cost – and often times can accomplish more than traditional IT technologies.

Web-based Architecture Moves Into the Enterprise

One example: GEFCO, a €3.5 billion company which ranks among Europe’s leading transport and logistic firms, adopted Exalead CloudView for use in their new application: “Track and Trace.” The application offers powerful search functionality and up-to-the-minute information from an extremely large data set.

“Before we installed Exalead CloudView it could take a day to get the results of such a CPU-intensive query, by which time the information was out of date,” said Guillaume Rabier, Manager of Studies and Projects at GEFCO. “Now we get these answers almost instantly.”

“With Exalead we are using database off-loading to intelligently rationalize the use of our resource systems. By maintaining a separate index, fewer of the users’ queries run against the database itself. This in turn reduces the load on the database servers which generates results faster and produces greater IT efficiency.”

Hadoop is worth all of the excitement.

We think the direction that companies like Exalead are taking will be worth even more.