Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

In September, Exalead will be present at no less than 3 European events. Whether you are in Berlin, London or Paris, come and meet our team!

• SuMa-eV Forum, Berlin, September 10th

The German “Association for the Promotion of Search Engine Technology and Free Access to Knowledge” holds its 6th meeting on the topic  “Information and Knowledge – The Driving Force of the 21st Century?” on September 10th. Exalead will be participating, and François Bourdoncle, Exalead co-founder, will lead a workshop on innovative and alternative new search engine technologies.
Learn More (in German)

• Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2009, London, September 16th and 17th

Exalead is both an exhibitor and sponsor of this summit held by Gartner, one of the most well-known analyst companies in Information Technologies. Do not miss the presentation by Jean-François Gaucheron from AFP (Agence France Presse), an Exalead customer, on Thursday 17th.
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• Conference Décisionnel CIO – LeMonde Informatique, Paris,
  September 22nd

This free meeting is for CIOs and Project Managers only. It will be held on the morning of September 22nd at Hôtel Prince de Galles.
Learn More | Subscribe (in French)
Discover more events in which Exalead will be participating

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.

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

Well, as some of you have guessed what has been cooked up and others were taken into our confidence… here it is!  The new version of our Exalead search engine, on-line today.

While concerned with promoting innovation in the web search engine sector, Exalead’s teams are proud to present you with this new version that is only the beginning of a new adventure.

Mostly based on a graphic overhaul of the engine, this version certainly provides new features and functions.  Some of these further respond to several suggestions that you have communicated to us via the Feedback space.

Among the new features and functions:

•    Auto-completion of the query, suggesting associated terms from the index that help you formulate your search

•    Associated searches, beneath the search bar, that allows you to re-launch a query in line with the preceding one,

•    Refinement by « languages » and by « country », presented in the form of a pie chart,

•    Display of thousands of images on the same search page and the repositioning of the refinement window, for an optimized presentation of results,

•    Customization tools for searches more adapted to your needs.  By clicking on the “tools” icon on the top right of the window, you can choose search refinement categories that you want to appear.

You will also notice that the sponsored links are displayed in a less intrusive manner than before, for a more comfortable read.

Rendez-vous from today forward on exalead.com/search to test it yourself!
And above all, don’t forget to send us your suggestions for improvement and discussion with other users on feedback.exalead.com!

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.

An Italian Exalead customer, CARIFE won the Innovation Award for the Web 2.0 and collaboration category.

The SMAU, a prominent Italian ICT Expo, particularly renowned for its attention to Innovation rewards the most forward-looking IT projects each year.

This year, Carife (Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara) caught the professional’s attention with its unified search service based on Exalead CloudView.

Exalead features allowed Calife employees to access relevant content more easily, share their knowledge and collaborate better: A single access point to more than 50 different information sources (mainly Lotus Notes), forward-looking navigation tools, an easy and fast implementation, and ability to respect security measures.

Congratulations to our Italian Team!

For more information, please consult the Carife client case

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.

The Spanish capital hosted some members of new elite technologies during Red Innova, the first forum on innovation and technology for Spanish  and Portuguese speaking markets.

This forum gathers Latin American Internet leaders and other Internet leaders interested in sharing their experiences, ideas and upcoming projects.

François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, made the trip and share roundtable on “Cloud computing & Information Access” with Tim Barker from SalesForce.com and Juan Tonda from Microsoft.

Here are some pictures for the curious!