01: Big Data: ISYS Webcast With IDC

All organizations keep a close watch on their assets — money in the bank, real estate, employees, equipment, orders, deliveries and intellectual property (like patents, trademarks and licenses).  Many even seek to measure the asset value of their brands.

This information is required for regulatory reasons and to enable the Board of Directors to manage the organization effectively.

However, very few have any kind of measure for the amount of information they have, even though this represents a fundamental asset of today’s organization.  Think of all the information residing in documents, emails, intranet, website, blogs and wikis.  Do you know how much potentially valuable data you have?  If you had to find business-critical data, could you find precisely what you need easily, quickly and to the level of detail you wanted?

Join ISYS and IDC’s Sue Feldman for a webcast on the topic of “Tackling Big Data:  Information Assets as a Competitive Advantage.”  During this session, Sue and ISYS CMO Mark Vadgama will discuss the state of information management, the challenges inherent in the explosion of unstructured content, and the methods and approaches today’s leading enterprises are employing to tackle ‘Big Data’.

02: A New Look for a New Era

For more than two decades, ISYS has continued to invest and innovate in its core IP, in line with customer requirements. This has enabled our technology to work in the most demanding of business environments.

During that period, we have successfully moved beyond desktop search into developing and delivering high-performance solutions for business-critical applications such as virtual data aggregation, enterprise content management, text analytics, email archiving, e-discovery and data loss prevention. And with the launch of ISYS Document Filters 10.0, we’re enabling organisations to better leverage the value of their growing volumes of unstructured data in the world of ‘Big Data’.

Today, we’re proud to unveil our new identity, which we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks. At the same time, we are developing a brand new website that is designed to provide a more engaging, informative and rewarding experience for prospects and customers alike.

After all, finding exactly the information you’re looking for (and being able to do something useful with it), should be as quick and painless as possible.

03: Charting the HP – Autonomy Deal

If you have been following the coverage of HP’s proposed acquisition of Autonomy, then you’ve likely picked up on a handful of repeated phrases, including “big data” “data science” and “information management.” Some terms are new, some are old, but each describes what enterprises are increasingly wrestling to control and leverage – namely, unstructured information. As HP looks to its software future while shedding its hardware past, it’s clear it views Autonomy as the first piece in addressing the big data problem.

From our perspective, we see the acquisition as validation of ISYS’s strategy of helping enterprises and technology partners manage and exploit their unstructured content assets. Further supporting this is the significant growth we have seen in our ISYS Document Filters technology, which is helping technology partners like MarkLogic, Sybase and Attensity account for unstructured information in their content applications. Below you will find a handful of perspectives on this deal, from analysts to subject matter experts. Leslie Owens of Forrester offers a thorough analysis and a view on some of the challenges ahead.

• What is Autonomy Without its Marketing? (Leslie Owens, Forrester)
• HP Rumored to be Buying UK’s Autonomy for 10b (Dave Kellogg, Kellblog)
• Autonomy Marketing, Meet HP (Miles Kehoe, Enterprise Search Blog)

04: Welcome Michael Neiswender

ISYS is delighted to welcome Michael Neiswender to our expanding technology partner Sales team.  Michael will be instrumental in building on the commercial success we have already achieved with our proprietary Document Filters technology.  Previously with Autonomy and a true industry veteran, Michael brings a wealth of experience and relationships to the business as we embark on an exciting period in our history.  We will continue to focus on delivering high-performance enterprise search solutions based on true innovation and world-class IP – free from any wider distractions.  Our customers and prospects would expect nothing less.

05: Obsessed With Performance For 23 Years

If a week is a long time in politics, then 23 years is a lifetime in the software business.

It can be argued that ISYS came into existence about a decade too early. Things, as they say, were different back then. The commercial internet didn’t exist, hard disks were 10 or 20MB, computers had 640k of memory, and people transferred information on floppy disks.

Why on earth would anyone need a search engine under those circumstances?

Why indeed.

In fact, that was our major challenge back then – educating prospects that there was value in finding stuff. The term “search engine” did not even exist, and most sales conversations would kick off with much verbal gesticulating about how what ISYS offered was different to opening your word processor and pressing control-F to search within a single document.

In a pre-Windows world, we toiled long and hard to make our software operate in a small memory footprint and run at a dazzling speed on modest hardware.

A decade on, and people had become “information aware”. People were amassing far greater collections of information on ever-larger storage devices and had a tacit understanding of the value of finding stuff. We no longer had to draw pictures.

But that initial decade of living by our wits in the wilderness, as well as being “character building”, resulted in a product with extremely efficient internals and with a technological maturity.

When the world was finally ready to really start searching, ISYS had already been there and done that.

The depth and breadth of our functionality today bears no resemblance to that initial product that shipped on a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk. No more than the computers of today bear any resemblance to the computers of 1988.

Yet the benefits of our long history and early Spartan hardware environment are visible today, if you know where to look. ISYS remains a product with exceptionally high performance and very efficacious use of memory. To be efficient, you need efficient bones. You can’t take something inefficient and add efficiency later. It’s like a fat kid putting on a skinny suit – it just doesn’t work.

I am sometimes asked how our software comes to be so fast, and I always explain you just have to be obsessed about performance. You have to care about it. It has to circulate like an undercurrent through every thought you have about every new feature. It has to be sitting on your shoulder at the first step of each development journey, and at the last.

One of our core pieces of high-performance functionality has always been our document filter technology. Rather than license third-party readers and be at the performance and reliability whim of another company, we developed our own. It was always a lynch-pin of our obsession about quality and performance, so it’s particularly pleasing that we are now offering direct licenses for our readers.

Document Filters is a technology that has been at our core for decades. Pivotal, used by every customer, but yet unsung. They are optimized, proven in their business relevance and mature. And now they’re available as a new product providing new value to new customers.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, I guess.

06: Make a Difference With ISYS

At last – an opportunity to give back! 

I don’t know about you, but I have often found myself in a rather awkward position throughout my career. 

As someone with school aged children, I have found myself approached on numerous occasions in my capacity as an employee of various IT organisations, with the simple request – “Is your organisation able to help us out with IT equipment or expertise?” 

More often than not, I have found myself having to deliver answers that are negative or excuses such as “sorry, our company does not donate equipment, we recycle everything” leaving me somewhat frustrated that this is something that I haven’t been able to impact.  That is, until now.

ISYS has launched a new initiative “Make a Difference” which at last enables IT employees and organisations to “give back” to their local schools.  

By migrating from Oracle (Outside In) or Autonomy (KeyView) with our Migration Program, ISYS not only ensures an organisation achieves a better product and service at a lower price, we will “Make a Difference” of $2,500 for IT to a local school of that organisation’s choice. *

At last I can attend my children’s local school and give a positive response when approached to assist them with their IT needs.  It’s great to be able to make a difference!

* ISYS will make an equivalent donation in other currencies for companies based outside the US

07: Embrace the revolution – Part 2

In my previous blog I talked about how enterprises need to be realistic about what information they can directly structure and organize – especially now that up to 90% of all content within an organization is unstructured.

Whilst watching a re-run recently of ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, it struck me that we are approaching a genuine watershed – a tipping point if you like – in relation to how organizations can, and ultimately must, respond to what I’d describe as the Third Information Age. 

If we turn the clock back, the First Information Age was arguably characterized by a relative scarcity of information for organizations, along with the technical challenges of capturing and using it.

In the (current) Second Age, we have witnessed the explosion of new digital media and content channels, platforms and devices. In this scenario, the challenge for organizations has been in trying to manage all of the huge volumes of unstructured information that are being generated and shared every single day.

But I believe a Third Age is now dawning. Here, organizations will acknowledge the ultimate futility of trying to manage what I’d term as escalating ‘information inflation’. Not simply the sheer volume and diversity of information being created, but the associated increase in human, technology and organizational costs of trying to manage what is essentially unmanageable.

A point is being reached where the costs of directly tackling this information inflation outweigh the business benefits.

Far better, smarter (and less costly) is to make information inflation irrelevant. Accept that your organization cannot ultimately keep up with the spread of unstructured information and instead focus resources on how best to intelligently search and extract what you need from the ‘chaos’.

The information genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and won’t go back in.

So, stop worrying about it and instead think about how your organization can turn the genie to your advantage.

08: ISYS Training Tutorials Now Available

ISYS customers already know the benefits of using our enterprise search software to provide a single and seamless point of access to all structured and unstructured information.

But to help you and your colleagues get the most from your ISYS experience, we have created a set of On-Demand Training Tutorials that give you the opportunity to broaden your query skills, expand your knowledge of ISYS refinement options, and discover useful tips and tricks.

ISYS On-Demand Training Tutorials are available for ISYS Workgroup, ISYS Workgroup Web, ISYS Enterprise Server and ISYS Anywhere. 

Visit our On-Demand Training Tutorials page and make sure you get the most from your ISYS experience.

09: The kids are alright?

As a working mother, my ability to consume and process data and information is driven by a busy lifestyle that seems to be all too common these days. Whilst I rarely miss the opportunity to beat the ‘working Mum’ drum as the reason for my hectic life, it does seem like we are all working longer hours and trying to squeeze every last ounce of productivity we can: work-life integration rather than work-life balance. 

I often read or hear about the ‘information explosion’ – particularly in relation to so-called unstructured data; and how this is materially affecting our ability to function and make decisions, whether professional or personal.

It makes me wonder whether the hardware and software that is such a part of everyday life is struggling to keep up, just as we mere mortals are.

My eldest son is 14 years old, and as yet relatively unaware of the huge explosion going on around him. Or, so I thought.

My experience of spending long hours with him preparing for what will be  non-stop assessment and exams over the next  two years suggests that he simply doesn’t accept anything but excellence from the technology that is meant to support him during this intense period of work.

OK, he expects that the technology will work. But he also expects to find all the information he’s looking for – quickly and easily – no matter where that information sits. He expects the technology to deliver relevance, variance, and all in a standardised format.

To accommodate this information, he can access 32Gb on his iPod, 64Gb on his iPad; and several hundred on his desktop.  He also has access to the hard drive on our Sky+ box, capacity on two other computers and three other mobile devices in the house. That’s more storage capacity than the bank I worked for many years ago had in its climate-controlled server room.

As I work every day with users today, I see people having to make decisions based on incomplete data; who spend hours searching for information and then compiling and standardising their results.

It makes me wonder how things will change as a new generation of working professionals demand far greater precision, relevance and speed from the software that enables them to make complete sense of the information around them.

I believe our children will neither accept the continuation of this increasingly problematic and painful situation; nor (I hope) add to it. As they move into the workplace, they will find effective ways to better consume and utilise the information they need. It means that the software providers and those who run and manage the technology world will need to seriously raise their game.

The kids will demand it.

10: Embrace the revolution – Part 1

As a child growing up in the 1970’s, content was a state of well-being. Eating, playing with friends and watching TV in the evenings.  

Fast forward 40 years and content has become something you create, view, buy, sell, download, modify, store and share. There’s a huge amount of it. It’s everywhere and everybody seems to be caught up in it. We are in the midst of an information explosion. Except this explosion is unique, because the effects are multiplying by the day.

For enterprises, trying to maintain some kind of coherent structure over their information is a huge and ongoing challenge. It takes time and can cost a lot of money.

But however well-organized and structured the information is, it is today only a small part of the total picture. Why? Because of user-generated content – the stuff that individuals within (and outside) your enterprise create, duplicate and share every single day.

It is by definition unstructured. The outcome of behaviours, processes and activities that are often meant to foster creativity and add value. But which inevitably stretch and evolve established information boundaries and taxonomies.

Add to that the proliferation of storage locations beyond the desktop (e.g. tablets, phones, USB drives) and the issue of information ‘find-ability’ becomes increasingly acute. Think of this as finding precisely the needle you need in a haystack that is growing exponentially.

As enterprises, we need to be realistic about what information we can directly structure and organise. The balance has shifted and up to 90% of all content today is unstructured.

Regardless of where it might reside, we need to be able to (virtually) aggregate content together in a way that allows us to be very precise about what we are seeking; and to do something meaningful with what we find.

The Scout Motto ‘Be prepared’ has never been more prescient. 

The revolution is already here, so embrace it and maybe even learn to love it.

Accept that you can’t store, structure and classify everything. Instead, use the right enterprise search technology to virtually aggregate all the critical sources of information you need to help enable more informed decision-making.

By doing so, you might not have to go through that physical (and very painful) legacy migration exercise you’d been planning.  

If that’s not an option, you can at least do it at your own pace, so that users aren’t affected by the move because they still have a uniform, single point of access – regardless of where the information really ‘lives’.

More on that in Part 2…