Archive for the ‘Document Filters’ Category

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: 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)

03: 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.

04: 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.

05: 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

06: Text-Aware Applications: What Defines Excellence

This just in:  if your analytics only take structured data into consideration, you’re missing a big piece of the story.  Accounting for ALL of your data (structured and unstructured) is the thrust of text-aware software.

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.

07: If you only do what you have always done …

I have thought a lot lately about the current state of innovation in the IT industry. Sure there are some standouts, and always will be, but on average are we becoming more, well, average? Does the current acquisition spree help or hinder innovation? What will be the impact of the global financial crisis, and is the insular nature of the IT industry doing us any favours?

As someone who came through that magnificent innovation engine that was Bell Labs, it almost seems we have come full circle. There always needs to be an innovation/commercialisation trade off. Unless innovation generates commercial benefit, it is difficult to argue for a sustaining of investment, and some would argue that there were a lot of “R&D institutions” in previous decades that did not focus enough on revenue generation, or even how to fund the innovation. But have we gone too far? With the current industry heavyweights on an acquisition spree like the world has never seen, it seems like we are now at the other end — focusing on revenue at the expense of innovation. When two-year-old businesses can even be offered the staggering sum of USD6B (let alone turn it down); when businesses are being created with the express intent of being sold to Google, have we gone too far? Yes it is easy to acquire innovation, but that does not guarantee it can be sustained. 

The real impact of the GFC on innovation is also yet to be felt. In times of financial crisis, costs across the business are given that extra scrutiny. While what I call the ‘event horizon’ of R&D – that period of time between the product idea and the product reality –  has certainly contracted, it is rarely in the same financial year as the expenditure. Consequently a lot of R&D funding in the last 18 months was reduced. This has a direct impact on innovation, and we will see a number of companies having a gap in their product release schedules in the next two to four years. 

The reason I have been thinking about this is close home. At ISYS we have recently found a niche with our ISYS Document Filters. This technology performs text extraction and viewing, similar to technology that Autonomy and Oracle acquired. The difference is we really care about it, and it is a large part of our business. So for us, innovating in this area becomes a competitive differentiator, and we think our customers deserve it. Our challenge has become how do we tell the world what we have? How do we reach a user and business community that has been anaesthetised by receiving the same types of messages from the same types of companies? I spoke recently with a strategy director at a large advertising firm, and during the conversation I realised that the problem is possibly of our own making. When most of us hire people we insist on them having done the job before, in a company just like ours. How does that generate new ideas and diversity of thought? Remember the diversity push in large companies in the mid 1990s? I think it is time to have another. Be brave, go hire the next marketing person, or next sales person from a completely different industry. Go diverse – you just might be surprised with the result.

08: More Taste With Half the Calories

The genius minds who invented such great products as minute rice would be proud of us for bringing you the “30-Minute Webinar.”  We’re big proponents of the old adage “If you can say it in fewer words, then do it.”  So we did.  Or … we will.  Later this week in fact.  Read on!

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?

09: NEW: ISYS Document Filters 2010

The momentum we’ve built up over the last several weeks culminates tomorrow in the release of ISYS Document Filters 2010 – the newest version of our embedded solution for text extraction, printing and high-definition viewing.  This latest release of ISYS Document Filters is especially noteworthy, as it adds the critical fidelity components of printing and high-definition viewing.  These capabilities have become high-demand capabilities from enterprises, OEMs and ISVs who are either looking to fill a gap or replace existing technology from Oracle or Autonomy. 

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.

10: 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.