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’.

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.

A successful text-aware solution needs to deeply inspect and unlock the intelligence hidden within unstructured data sources.  Many industry experts say this is so important that it will define who wins or loses in a variety of market segments.  So the question is…who can you turn to, who can you trust and what are the costs?

To help you better understand your options, we’re  hosting a 30-minute webcast with Nick Patience, Co-Founder of The 451 Group; Andrew Neugebauer, Sr. Product Manager for Sybase, An SAP Company; and ISYS CMO Mark Vadgama.  The webcast will offer:

• 451 Group:  Extracting ‘intelligence’ from Unstructured Data
• Sybase IQ:  Overview of Unstructured Data Analytics
• ISYS:  A cost-effective, partner-driven solution for text extraction

Register for the webcast by visiting www.isys-search.com/freedomatlast or by calling 1 800 992-4797.

30-Minute Webinar #1:  A single view of corporate data

Hosted by our Asia Pacific team, this session will appeal to those desperately trying to avoid another expensive data migration project and instead enable a universal view of corporate knowledge no matter where the content resides (no data exodus required).  Virtual data aggregation has become  a must-have capability in an age where instant access is driven by risk mitigation, compliance and reliable decision making.  The session will kick off at 10 a.m. Sydney Time (AEDT), this Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010.

Please join us by registering today.

30-Minute Webinar The Sequel:  Knowledge-Rich Solutions for Unstructured Data

ISYS customer Janya highlights the growing push for semantic analysis around unstructured content and how they are tackling it today.  Janya VP of Product Strategy, Dave Schubmehl, is the real deal when it comes to this topic, having previously served as VP for search and discovery products over at OpenText.  The session begins at High Noon, Eastern Time, on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010.

Join us, won’t you?

We invite you to join the group, connect with ISYS experts and with other ISYS users via the group’s forums.  ISYS staffers post regular updates about recent events and news, making it an ideal place to stay informed of the latest and greatest ISYS happenings.

We look forward to connecting with you all.

The addition of printing and high-definition viewing was developed completely by the ISYS R&D team; these new capabilities are the most significant pieces of IP we’ve developed since the original release of ISYS Document Filters in March 2009 (formerly known as ISYS File Readers).  As you will recall, we’ve gained several new OEM customers in recent weeks, including Sybase and Janya, while continuing to expand our traditional embedded search deals, which recently includes Bridgeline Digital.

We’re taking the show on the road to Interop New York, where we’ll be in town on Wednesday to get the word out.  Look for the ISYS Street Team handing out branded canvas bags to the masses attending the event.

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!

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.

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.

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.