01: Sybase Taps ISYS Document Filters

As Gartner prepares to release its upcoming “State of the Union” on enterprise search, what’s clear from our perspective is that future market growth will be driven by innovations in text analytics and federated analysis of content stores.  No, this isn’t breaking news, and it doesn’t mean that commodity enterprise search goes away.  But if our customer base is any indication, today’s requirements have almost exclusively moved away from “search as convenience” to the “mandate of instant insight.”

Sybase is one of the driving forces behind text analytics today, and ISYS is pleased that it’s pioneering work in text analytics is playing a key role in the latest release of Sybase IQ.  At the TDWI conference last month in San Diego, Sybase announced its intention to enter into an agreement with ISYS under which Sybase will resell ISYS Document Filters as a key component for text analytics in Sybase IQ. 

Since the introduction of ISYS Document Filters in 2009, we’ve learned a great deal from implementations that are serving broad applications and use cases.  In fact, the innovations we’re actively infusing into our text extraction capabilities are being shaped by those experiences.  The applications that ISYS Document Filters help drive give us just a glimpse of how text analytics is evolving and how today’s innovators are approaching the “mandate of instant insight” challenge.

02: Webinar: Document Filters and Search-Enabled Applications

It is a little known fact that document filters serve as a key first step in driving search-enabled applications. Due to the critical importance of document filters, many software vendors license this technology from one of only three commercial providers, of which ISYS Search Software is one.

To help attendees better understand document filters and the commercial and open-source options available, ISYS is hosting a 30-minute webinar in conjunction with experts from Lucid Imagination and New Idea Engineering on Wednesday, July 28, at 1 p.m. Eastern. Titled, “The Critical Role of Document Filters in Search-Enabled Applications”, the webinar will offer attendees:

• An overview of document filters
• The role they play in search-enabled applications
• Which formats and support levels are key
• A description of commercial and open source options

Presenting during this 30-minute webinar will be Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering; Eran Yaniv, Solutions Manager, Lucid Imagination; and Dave Haucke, VP Global Marketing, ISYS Search Software.  Register for the webinar today!

03: ISYS Upgrades Enterprise Search Software to v9.6

Today we bring you fantastic news that Version 9.6 of the ISYS Enterprise Search Software suite is now available.  Noted below are just a handful of the key enhancements, including automatic language detection, early binding security and significant increases in indexing performance.  Maintenance customers wishing to upgrade or parties interested in learning more can visit our ISYS 9.6 overview page and request additional information.

For this cycle, we focused on capabilities that would meet next-generation federated search requirements.  Given our exclusive focus on enterprise search infrastructure and embedded search solutions, we identified the following three areas as key to our customers’ success:

Language Support
To ease the findability of critical corporate intelligence, we introduced Automatic Language Detection, which instantly recognizes documents in 36 different languages. The benefit to end users is the ability to refine results based on a given language, or include a pre-query filter to restrict searches to a specific language. Also new in 9.6 is the ability to extend stemming to French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Security
To cater for broad security requirements, ISYS has introduced “early binding” document-level security for file systems, which ensures:

• High-performance secure search (no penalty for filtering unauthorized documents)
• Result counts are 100% accurate on the first result page
• Refinement facets only available for authorized documents

Performance
In lab tests using a typical mix of corporate content, ISYS 9.6 achieved indexing speeds of 100 gigabytes per hour. Our enhancements at the text extraction level have enabled us to see an average indexing speed increase of 3x.

Learn more about ISYS 9.6 and request additional information.

04: Security and Enterprise Search

Historically, enterprise search vendors have done a poor job addressing the subject of security.  In some cases, vendors didn’t have a good enough answer (and some are still struggling), hence the reason for the radio silence on the topic.  But in the main, I think we merely took the topic for granted and made assumptions that security would just be “taken care of” in the natural course of IT management.

With the continued rise in bigger and broader federated search deployments, security is only becoming more important, and as a result we’re doing more in terms of educating enterprises on the topic.  Our latest effort is a technical white paper titled, “The Principles of Security Management in the Context of Secure Search.”  While this paper won’t serve as a “how-to” manual on the subject of secure search, it does provide a suitable framework for better understanding the topic and ensuring your security managers are comfortable with the requirements.

05: Forget “Search” — It Is All About The “Virtual Aggregation” Of Data

I mentioned in a post late last year that 2010 would be the year of federated search, but now I think we need to go even further …

The number of record and content management systems that are coming onto the market (and the investment that is being made by vendors and customers alike) is simply staggering.  In isolation, a large number of these systems are good applications; some are even great … with some tremendous functionality.  But having spent time at the HP TRIM User Forum (TUF23) in Sydney last week, I can say they all have one thing in common – they require end users to know where content is in order to find it.

Think about this for a minute … if you know your content is in HP TRIM, then the search in TRIM will allow you to find what you are looking for, same if you know your content is in SharePoint.  However, no matter what role you have in an organisation, chances are you will interact with more than one of these data repositories.  From an enterprise perspective we cannot continue to expect our users to know where information lives.

The issue today is that data needs to live in different places.  These different repositories are purpose-built for the type of information that they contain.  The term “federated search” does not really do the concept justice … more accurately, what we are doing with federated search is providing users with the ability to find information by “virtually aggregating data” or allowing users to ask for some information that is likely scattered across multiple repositories.  

We can even take this one step further, following on from the commentary about “physical” data aggregation projects that are being embarked upon in Europe and the US after some high-profile information failures.  If you have a physical data aggregation project going on in your organisation, stop right now and see if there is a better way to accomplish the end result you are looking for. 

We can wrestle with terminology all we want (CMSWatch’s Theresa Regli recently presented some great thoughts on the related topic of “enterprise search” vs “federated search”), as long as we all agree that the true benefit of this technology is to locate and leverage information where it resides.

06: Early Warning Systems

As a mother of three, I read about the case of Angela Gordon recently and wondered how we could miss key warning signs in our social services work.  In my field, I see the obstacles companies face every day when it comes to leveraging their content, so I can understand, in part, the challenges of social services work.  But when information is this critical, I have to question why we appear to be banging our heads against the wall with half-solutions.

Since Sarah Payne’s abduction and murder (yet another high-profile failure), UK police forces have been trying to find ways to enable better access to all information that may be relevant, whether checking on someone applying for a job or investigating a crime.

The collection of various reported stories of neglect and abuse in children’s own homes has UK councils struggling to determine why social workers don’t have the information they need to pinpoint situations requiring intervention. 

To address the problem, some are building data warehouses with BI capability on the front end.  But this is a huge undertaking, expensive, lengthy and very difficult to get right.  What’s more, it doesn’t provide a short-term solution. 

Given our experience in working with police forces, we’ve seen search technology deliver immediate improvements in intelligence work, often serving as an early warning system for investigators.  In the very least, we should be looking as these capabilities in the interim to help stem the tide of costly missed warning signs.

07: Ben Franklin and the Evolution of Enterprise Search

Given how prolific he was, Ben Franklin could have very easily invented enterprise search in his day.  That is, if he hadn’t been so busy with everything else.  And even though he had an incredible mind, not even he could have fully appreciated what a game-changer electricity would be.  Today, we only consciously acknowledge electricity when we have none; otherwise it’s primarily an afterthought, despite the fact that harnessing and generating this power remains one of humankind’s greatest achievements.

Reflecting on this brought to mind a conversation I had with Sue Feldman of IDC some years ago.  During our discussion, she made a statement to the effect of, “Some day, search will be analogous to electricity.  When you turn on a light, you don’t think about electricity; you just focus on the fact that something has been illuminated for you.”  Perhaps others have viewed search in a similar fashion, but it’s an analogy that made perfect sense at the time and is even more fitting today.

While I can’t speak for the entire industry, the types of deals ISYS has been doing in recent months are more and more inline with this analogy.  Whether we’re talking about embedded search, or search as an application, slowly but surely search appears to be moving away from just a blank search box and into a world where search is primarily an enabling technology.  In that sense, enterprise search is neither the destination nor the journey … it’s merely the light that enables you to proceed with whatever it is you were doing in the first place.

08: “Need to Have” Profile in Enterprise Search

I ran across an August 2008 press release that seemed rather relevant given recent terrorist events.  Published by the House Science and Technology Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, the release focused on failures and mismanagement in one of our country’s most important counter terrorism programs.  Analysts from 16 agencies were supposed to have access to intelligence information intended to help them predict and prevent future attacks, but through program mismanagement they were left dead in the water.  One congressman commented at the time that “the program not only can’t connect the dots, it can’t find the dots.”  

Being the good salesman that I am, I immediately got on the phone with his office, because of our longstanding experience with providing an important function in “connecting dots.”   Namely, we find the dots and you connect them.  I  have worked with dozens if not hundreds of crime analysts and investigators over the years, and it seems every successful investigation begins with a skilled investigator following up on a hunch that prompts a search that uncovers  a dot … and another dot … and another … and so on, ad infinitum.

My fellow industry colleagues and I are always trying to relay the “need to have” aspects of our technology, and I’d be hard pressed to find a better example than this.  Am I just too close to the market, or are we as enterprise search professionals just not doing a good enough job of communicating the “so what” factor?

09: Visit Us at LegalTech New York

I’ve been to New York City more than a dozen times in the last seven years, and it never gets old, even in February.  ISYS, as a company, has been traveling to NYC for the LegalTech event since 1994, which means it has been 16 years since we first started connecting more deeply with law firms and other software vendors looking to round out their technology with embedded search.  If you’ll be in town for the event, please stop by Booth #329 and say hello to the team.

What makes LegalTech pretty unique is the commaraderie of the event.  Maybe it’s because our focus is on connecting with our fellow exhibitors, but we always leave the event smarter than when we arrived.  We’ve never approached it as a hard sales exercise; we’re there to learn as much as the next guy and gal, so from that standpoint it’s refreshing.  For those of you who have direct legal responsibilities, or for those who are on the periphery dealing with corporate compliance and risk issues, I’d love to hear what you’re looking to get out of LegalTech this time around.  From our point of view, we’re still quite focused on embedded search for traditional ISVs/OEMs as well as SaaS providers, but we’re also increasingly engaging in conversations regarding early case assessment with commercial organizations.

For an event of this size to still be highly relevant, it’s clear these issues remain quite acute.  As always, I’m looking forward to it, so we hope to see you next week.  As a reminder, the event is at the Hilton New York, from Feb. 1-3.  I believe the folks at American Lawyer Media are offering a complimentary exhibit hall pass if you want to drop in for an afternoon.

10: Mobile Access Emerging

You’ve heard the phrase “eat your own dog food.”  At the risk of being too promotional, I’m increasingly liking the taste of this mobile enterprise search chow.  Late last year over the holidays, I was stuck at the airport because of weather conditions (snow, of which we’ve had plenty in Denver this season).  As is typical, I needed to access various content quickly on my iPhone, and in this case I needed to get to some key documents in an effort to help my sales and technical teams close a transaction and kick off the order fulfillment process.  It was a day trip, so no laptop, which meant I avoided the hassle that is known as the “laptop security screening dance.” 

Addressing this current need meant pulling in pieces of information from my email (on our hosted email service), Word documents (on my laptop back at work), as well as a PDF of the sales contract (on our corporate servers).  The fact of the matter is we’ve been talking about the mobile enterprise for a handful of years.  And while remote access and increased access points have brought us a long way, it wasn’t until we started bringing along these mobile enterprise search capabilities that I felt like the rubber was finally hitting the road. Perhaps a self-serving statement, but nonetheless true in my situation.

Long story short, my ability to search across these repositories from my iPhone, snag the key documents and act on them helped get me two very productive hours and a closed transaction with a new customer at the end of the quarter.  It beats playing Sudoku!