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.

During that period, we have successfully moved beyond desktop search into developing and delivering high-performance solutions for business-critical applications such as virtual data aggregation, enterprise content management, text analytics, email archiving, e-discovery and data loss prevention. And with the launch of ISYS Document Filters 10.0, we’re enabling organisations to better leverage the value of their growing volumes of unstructured data in the world of ‘Big Data’.

Today, we’re proud to unveil our new identity, which we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks. At the same time, we are developing a brand new website that is designed to provide a more engaging, informative and rewarding experience for prospects and customers alike.

After all, finding exactly the information you’re looking for (and being able to do something useful with it), should be as quick and painless as possible.

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)

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.

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

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.

I often read or hear about the ‘information explosion’ – particularly in relation to so-called unstructured data; and how this is materially affecting our ability to function and make decisions, whether professional or personal.

It makes me wonder whether the hardware and software that is such a part of everyday life is struggling to keep up, just as we mere mortals are.

My eldest son is 14 years old, and as yet relatively unaware of the huge explosion going on around him. Or, so I thought.

My experience of spending long hours with him preparing for what will be  non-stop assessment and exams over the next  two years suggests that he simply doesn’t accept anything but excellence from the technology that is meant to support him during this intense period of work.

OK, he expects that the technology will work. But he also expects to find all the information he’s looking for – quickly and easily – no matter where that information sits. He expects the technology to deliver relevance, variance, and all in a standardised format.

To accommodate this information, he can access 32Gb on his iPod, 64Gb on his iPad; and several hundred on his desktop.  He also has access to the hard drive on our Sky+ box, capacity on two other computers and three other mobile devices in the house. That’s more storage capacity than the bank I worked for many years ago had in its climate-controlled server room.

As I work every day with users today, I see people having to make decisions based on incomplete data; who spend hours searching for information and then compiling and standardising their results.

It makes me wonder how things will change as a new generation of working professionals demand far greater precision, relevance and speed from the software that enables them to make complete sense of the information around them.

I believe our children will neither accept the continuation of this increasingly problematic and painful situation; nor (I hope) add to it. As they move into the workplace, they will find effective ways to better consume and utilise the information they need. It means that the software providers and those who run and manage the technology world will need to seriously raise their game.

The kids will demand it.

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?