Author Archive

01: What the SAP Agreement Means for ISYS

Well, quite a bit has been written in recent weeks about the global OEM agreement that ISYS secured with software giant SAP. Much of the comment has understandably been technical in nature, as well as what it means for the SAP products that are embedding ISYS Document Filters and Big Data as a driving force in Text Analytics.

But what I’d like to touch on here is just what the agreement means for ISYS as a company, in validating our medium term strategy of becoming the pre-eminent player in “Embedded Search”. In effect, decoupling our solutions (like Document Filters and Integration Kit) and using these as the dedicated search components powering a range of broader, search-enabled solutions.

In pursuing  this strategy, we now not only have major vendors like SAP, Sybase and MarkLogic; but through them and other larger Partners (such as HP, EMC, Proofpoint and Detica) also provide embedded ISYS solutions to many top Fortune 500 companies in business-critical application areas like Text Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, Email Archiving, eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention.

Today, this means there is a high likelihood that your business is utilizing some form of search-enabled application powered by ISYS – along with 16,000 other organizations that use ISYS technology to help grow their business.

It also means that we have grown quite a bit as a company, based on delivering superior technology, backed up by great service and support. Indeed, those were essentially the reasons why SAP chose ISYS to help power its new generation of enterprise software solutions. We worked closely with SAP over 18 months and were able to leverage our existing relationship with Sybase, itself an SAP Company.

ISYS has very definitely arrived. Small wonder that many ISVs are now looking to us and our class-leading Document Filters technology to help them and their own customers extract greater business value in the world of Big Data.

02: 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.

03: 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!