Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

…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.

We are pleased to report that Exalead was named to Gartner’s 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, receiving high marks for “completeness of vision.” In fact, Exalead is one of only two Visionary companies in this year’s quadrant, as changes to the inclusion criteria eliminated several previous members.

An interesting point is that several of our key competitors in the space took a few steps backwards between now and 2007. Endeca, Google and Autonomy all took hits on the “ability to execute” scale, Microsoft FAST lost some ground on vision. We don’t want to speculate about why exactly this is, but it does seem to indicate that the demands of the space is shifting as it grows (Gartner estimated that globally the total 2007 software revenue in the enterprise search market neared $860.3 million and is expected to grow to $1.5 billion by 2012), and that perhaps it is time for a new breed of search vendor to take the lead.

According to the report, “Visionaries demonstrate imaginative and insightful approaches to the information access technology market… and possess architectural flexibility and creative means of establishing relevancy.” Of course, we don’t wear blinders ; we know Gartner thinks that we need to establish more traction and financial resources to make the jump to the Leaders quadrant, but with 170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month we feel we are in a position to do this.

Additionally, we just found out we received a high ranking on this year’s Software 500 list (with a 310.8% growth rate); in fact, from 2007, our rank jumped by more than 70 points. We were also named one of the Top 10 companies in the $10-30 Million revenue range as well as one of the “Top 10 Leaders in Software Revenue Growth Overall.

With these numbers and our recent expansion into the U.S., the Leaders quadrant could be just around the corner….

And by cat, I mean our North American expansion and our new product line CloudView .
In June, we appointed Paul Doscher (former CEO of open source BI leader Jaspersoft) our North American CEO.

Tuesday 23 at the Enterprise Search Summit West, Exalead announced the CloudView family of products. Available in Q4 of 2008, this family includes Cloudview OEM, Cloudview Search and Cloudview desktop.

Drowning in data…

Data exists locally on a variety of devices, behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems and outside the firewall with SaaS applications and on the Web. That’s a whole lot of data from a whole lot of different sources. Peering into this enterprise content cloud is hard work for companies that need to be able to bring together a veritable mountain of unstructured and structured data and make it actionable for faster business decisions.

Bottom line: this content cloud has created the demand across all industries for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. Being able to expand their view into various data sources (and into structured and unstructured data) in a way that brings meaningful context and understanding (i.e. not data in a vacuum) equates to an enormous competitive advantages for any enterprise.

Of course, this requires a platform that can do several things: handle a huge amount of data, scale as the company and data pool grows and changes, and allow flexibility in customizing the solution for specific industries. The old guard search tools simply aren’t cutting it anymore in this evolving space.

170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month means that we here at Exalead have a clear view of the emerging issues that face enterprise customers. Or perhaps put differently, we have a Cloud-y View of what companies need to stay afloat through the next wave of information access challenges.

Each year, KMWorld, the famous American magazine specialized in Knowledge Management, is charged with the mission of selecting products and software on the cutting edge. Every year, Exalead’s performance captures the attention of KMWorld’s professionals with its unified search platform that is capable of easily and intelligently handling all types of research -on your PC, the Web and enterprise servers- in any data format.

“For the third consecutive year, Exalead’s solution has impressed us with its rapid and efficient search and by its precise refinement of results. Their innovative search approach is a real added value for their clients and makes our experts take notice, watching them year after year,” comments Hugh McKellar, editor-in-chief of KMWorld.

Our motivation is at a maximum during the fall, which is full of new product announcements and events.

To see the complete list of “KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Products of the year,” Click here.

“Where did I save this file?” If that question sounds familiar to you -or any less polite version of it- exalead one:desktop is the tool you need.

Designed for those who need unified and simplified access to all data saved on their PCs -documents, messages, attached files, contacts, appointments, images, audio and video files…- exalead one:desktop is now available in its new version 4.6

exalead one:desktop belongs to the exalead one:search range of products. The professional edition of exalead one:desktop enables the ability to search simultaneously on your PC, your enterprise servers and the Internet.

In addition to the existing functionalities of Exalead’s desktop product which include easy navigation, search in real-time, unlimited scalability, indexing an unlimited number of documents in 120 file formats (300 in the professional edition) and email sources (including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Thunderbird, etc), the new tool offers the following features:
- One click tabbing between desktop, web, image, video and Wikipedia™ search – allows for easy and intuitive navigation around the browser-based interface
- Easy personalization of tools in the navigation pane and optional tag cloud display for related terms enabling the user to further refine their results according to their needsFor the professional edition:
- Complete integration with exalead one:enterprise – for a consistent search experience on the PC, web and corporate intranet
- User interface white label functionality – enables companies to completely brand the user interface and personalize results through XML API
exalead one:desktop is also available in a free downloadable version. To get it, click here.To read the Press Release, click here.To get more information on exalead one:desktop product, click here.

One of the most important websites in Italy, the Virgilio portal, held by Telecom Italia, inaugurated a search service for its classified ads and has integrated the Exalead search engine for these ads.

Virgilio has retained the technology exalead one:search for its performance: speed of indexing, volume, scalability. In fact, the portal indexes close to a million classified ads in different domains: automobile, motor bikes, real estate, jobs, etc. and federates more than 100 international sites (Ebay, Vivastreet…) or Italians.

In line with its objective to grow traffic and increase visibility of the portal, Virgilio wishes to also go farther with Exalead by developing new value added services.

Discover the new Virgilio service, and if you speak Italian, try it! http://ricercaannuncio.alice.it/hp_annunci.html

The end of 2007 was a busy time for signing new clients, which means we’ve had quite a number of new deployments in the first quarter of this year. Notable among them:

• Steelcase, the world leader in the office furniture industry, and its partner Capgemini, installed exalead one:enterprise on Steelcase’s corporate intranet and extranet in only two months.
• Lagardère Média, a global media leader developing, promoting and disseminating information and culture across five continents, selected Exalead as the search engine for all its Internet sites. Première.fr is one of the first sites to launch with Exalead.
• Wolters Kluwer, a French publishing company, recently deployed Exalead on its intranet to index information contained in a large repository of PDF documents.
• Three notable British websites have also selected Exalead as their search engine:
  www.croftinginquiry.org
  www.eprocurementscotland.com
  www.crownoffice.gov.uk
• Les Entreprises du Médicament (Leem), the French organization for professionals in the pharmacological industry, now uses exalead one:search as the search engine on its Extranet.

The European Commission has approved funding for QUAERO, an advanced research and development program concerned with the automatic processing of digital multimedia content. The program involves a consortium of 23 partners (including Exalead) and is headed by the Thomson group. Read the press release on Europa, the portal site of the European Union.

The release of exalead one:enterprise 4.6 offers several new enhancements that are designed to help organizations easily configure and customize business applications, including hybrid vertical search applications. In addition, exalead one:enterprise 4.6 offers new connectors for enterprise databases and a unique developer toolkit designed to easily structure unstructured data.

Also included in exalead one:enterprise 4.6 is a unique HTML extraction toolkit, which is designed to take advantage of the structural indicators that are already built-in to HTML pages. Exalead has added a variety of new features that will appeal to IT Managers and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partners, including several new application programming interfaces (APIs). As a result, exalead one:enterprise can serve as a flexible platform for white box solutions.

Included is a new enterprise connector for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, allowing Microsoft users to enjoy extremely high scalability – several billions of documents – the ability to index multimedia files, enriched query processing and Exalead’s Search by Serendipity experience.

Read the Press Release
More details