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.

Those who follow ISYS in the UK know that Solcara has been a longtime, valued partner of ours.  Solcara designs federated search technology designed to help organizations better control, manage and locate their digital information.  Recently, Solcara announced its new SolSearch solution, which pairs our indexing technology with Solcara’s federated search capabilities.

Solcara has had considerable success serving the information access and management needs of the legal industry, among other markets.  It helps professionals connect to their know how systems, as well as search and locate vital information that resides across a variety of sources, both internally and externally.  We’re pleased to play a role in these solutions and look forward to continued work with Solcara.

Take a moment to learn more about SolSearch and see what it can do for your organization.  You can also access third-party reporting and analysis from IT Week and over at the Beyond Search blog.

This Thursday (June 19 at 11 a.m. Pacific), ISYS will be participating in a panel discussion at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.  The panel is part of Gilbane’s Enterprise Search and Text Analytics track, with the topic focused on what’s new and hot in search.  The panel will be moderated by Gilbane’s lead analyst for search, Lynda Moulton, who is constantly battling Steve Arnold for the title of “Most Prolific Enterprise Search Blogger” (although Steve, and possibly even Lynda, might object to the phrase “enterprise search”).  Both Lynda’s blog and Steve’s blog provide perhaps the best and most thorough collection of news and analysis of what’s happening in search, so be sure to check them out.

A brief description of the session can be found on the Gilbane San Francisco website.  For ISYS’ part, we’ll be discussing some of the new capabilities you’ll find in our new upcoming release.  This will be your chance to get the inside scoop on the technology before it’s released, so be sure to attend and say hello after the session.

As ISYS Search Software approaches its 20th birthday, its dutiful staff felt it was time to expand our communications into the ever-expanding world of corporate blogging.  And while individuals with greater knowledge on the subject could debate for days the merits of blogging, for ISYS it’s a logical extension of the types of customer and industry communications we’ve been doing for many years.

Longtime readers of our ISYS Update newsletter have been following along at home for quite some time now.  We evolved from a print edition to HTML email and now onto the weblog format.  Never fear loyal readers — our ever-popular riddle will make regular appearances in the blog, so we’ll continue to feed your brain-tease fix.

The focus of ISYS Enterprise Search Insights is to highlight the enterprise search industry’s hot topics and issues, tying them back to how ISYS and its customers see the world.  Various members of our staff will chime in from time to time, ensuring we capture and communicate multiple perspectives on the subject of search software.   We’ll also be tapping guest speakers, from customers and partners to industry insiders and observers.  You can rest assured we’re not looking to use this as a political vehicle; we’ll rely on the same plain-talk honesty we’ve become known for, with the overarching goal of highlighting key topics and stirring new ways of thinking about enterprise search.

To kick things off, we’ll be doing a multi-part series on various search topics with which we’re quite familiar.  Whenever possible, we’ll point to complementary content to help expand on the topic.  For this first series, we’ll be looking at our collection of enterprise search white papers, with topics ranging from e-discovery compliance to search analytics.  Please don’t hesitate to comment as we go along … the more comments, the better the discussion.