We’re pleased to announce the release of the newest addition to our family of OEM search solutions — ISYS File Readers.  The ISYS File Readers are an embeddable set of document filters for extracting text and metadata from more than 200 file, email and container formats, in 60 different languages.  ISYS File Readers compete with similar products from Oracle (Outside In) and Autonomy (KeyView).  ISYS File Readers provide information management software vendors and companies relying on Apache Lucene with a powerful and proven document filter alternative.

For additional information, please review the ISYS File Readers press release, the ISYS File Readers product information page, or a recent write-up of the ISYS File Readers by Ovum.

The US division of ISYS Search Software has been buzzing over the hiring of Bob Smith as our new President of The Americas Operations.  Bob comes by way of the Silicon Valley start-up world, where we successfully led and grew a handful of emerging tech companies.  You can read the full detail of his hiring here.

This continues our exciting 2009 growth plans that began late last year with the hiring of Scott Coles as our new CEO.  It’s going to be a big year for your friends at ISYS, so stay tuned to this blog for updates.

We’d like to kick off 2009 by wishing everyone a prosperous year.  Be sure to bookmark our blog, as 2009 will be a busy and exciting year for your ISYS friends.  We’ll keep track of it all right here.

The experts over at New Idea Engineering recently interviewed ADD Systems, an ISYS customer doing some great things with search.  Read up on it, then contact us to discuss your own 2009 search needs.  ISYS takes great pride in its customer interactions, so don’t hesitate to put us to the test.  We’ll spend as much time as it takes to get you squared away and “cooking with gas.”

An addled goose who goes by the name of Steve Arnold recently interviewed our new CEO, Scott Coles, as part of ArnoldIT’s Search Wizards Speak series of interviews with enterprise search executives.  The interview covers a lot of ground, including  ISYS’s plans for search in 2009 and beyond.

What’s clear is ISYS is taking everything customers and partners have come to know and love about us over the last 20 years and going even deeper to address the real challenges in search and help customers further leverage their search investments.  Some of the ways we’re doing this is through complimentary executive briefings and application audits.

When industry consultants like Steve Arnold say that search is broken, it’s largely the result of poor education and a disconnect between the vendor and customer.  Our executive briefings and application audits are designed to get us aligned with your requirements immediately from the onset, thus ensuring successful implementation and end-user adoption.

We invite you to contact us to request a complimentary session with our leadership team.  We’ve always taken great pride in the personal service we deliver to our customer base, so we’re pleased to further extend this benefit.

We’ve been deliberately quiet as of late, thanks to a number of fun projects happening behind the scenes here at ISYS.  This week was just a taste of what’s to come in 2009.  In addition to announcing the appointment of our new CEO, Scott Coles, we also launched Version 9 of our ISYS:web information access and discovery solution for intranet search and site search.  The folks at EContent and Arnold IT covered it here and here.

Additionally, we rolled out our new website.  Collectively, these milestone moments kick off a new phase in our formidable history.  The year ahead for ISYS will be characterized by aggressive growth on all fronts, most importantly on the product development side of things.  We invite media, analysts and customers to contact us to learn more about our direction and what the roadmap looks like.

We’re now live at Defrag 2008, where folks are beginning to arrive for this two-day event in downtown Denver.  ISYS is exhibiting its Version 9 technology on the demo floor, and our very own Derek Murphy will be participating on a panel discussion on “Next-Level Discovery” on Tuesday at 11:15 a.m.

If you’re at the event, stop by and see our new demonstration of ISYS:web 9.  We’re using an index of 450,000+ Enron emails to demonstrate our parametric search and refinement, as well as our new “intelligence clouds.”  If you can’t make the event, contact us to request a one-on-one demonstration.

If you’re planning on attending KMWorld in San Jose next week, be sure to stop by our booth (#219) and say hello. We’ll be exhibiting as part of the Enterprise Search Summit West, which is again co-located with the traditional KMWorld & Intranets show. The event takes place Sept. 23-25 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

It addition to showing off our new ISYS 9 technology, our very own Derek Murphy will also be participating in a panel discussion on multi-lingual search. Derek’s panel begin at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24. Hope to see you there!

We’re pleased to relay the news that our new ISYS 9 Suite was named to KMWorld’s Trend Setting Product list of 2008.  Obviously we’re biased on this one, but we believe our latest enterprise search offering gives our customers even greater “beyond search” power, unlocking the true potential of parametric search, navigation, results refinement and discovery.

As we add new ISYS 9 customers and learn more about their ISYS implementations, we’ll post those user stories on our website and blog. So be sure to check back often.

One of the nice benefits of being part of the search game for 20 years is we’ve built up a solid base of longtime customers.  Many of them happen to be in the complementary fields of government, legal and law enforcement.  We routinely receive positive feedback from these groups, often unsolicited, so today we’d like to share with you a quick snippet that clearly illustrates the tangible value our customers get from their use of ISYS.

In a recent email exchange from our friends at the Michigan State Police, we learned about one of the ways they use ISYS for behind-the-firewall search.  The following is a quote from Sandy Chapman, who works in the Michigan Intelligence Operation Center:

“(ISYS) has come in handy many, many times. We will get calls from officers stating ‘I know you put this bulletin out maybe a month ago, but I can’t find it.’ In these instances we will get a few keywords from the officer as to the subject matter; enter into ISYS and 99% of the time we can find what they are looking for. ”

We obviously appreciate these comments, as they confirm we’re delivering on our mission – helping people find information fast.  Are our customers’ comments always so rosey?  Of course not.  But fortunately for us, the majority of feedback we receive is constructive in nature, and you’ll find that a good percentage of that input eventually works its way into our technology in the form of feature enhancements.  Our customers have made ISYS possible, and we appreciate the ongoing dialog we maintain with them.

If you’re in the Denver area July 25-26, we invite you to check out the NFPA Tech Institute event for paralegals, where ISYS will be exhibiting and demonstrating its recently released ISYS:desktop 9 application.  We’ve made several enhancements to better serve e-discovery needs, so be sure to download a trial version and check it out.

The NFPA event will be held at the Doubletree Hotel in Aurora, CO.  Conference hours are 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, and 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday.