
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.

It is a little known fact that document filters serve as a key first step in driving search-enabled applications. Due to the critical importance of document filters, many software vendors license this technology from one of only three commercial providers, of which ISYS Search Software is one.
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:
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!

Given how prolific he was, Ben Franklin could have very easily invented enterprise search in his day. That is, if he hadn’t been so busy with everything else. And even though he had an incredible mind, not even he could have fully appreciated what a game-changer electricity would be. Today, we only consciously acknowledge electricity when we have none; otherwise it’s primarily an afterthought, despite the fact that harnessing and generating this power remains one of humankind’s greatest achievements.
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.

I’ve been to New York City more than a dozen times in the last seven years, and it never gets old, even in February. ISYS, as a company, has been traveling to NYC for the LegalTech event since 1994, which means it has been 16 years since we first started connecting more deeply with law firms and other software vendors looking to round out their technology with embedded search. If you’ll be in town for the event, please stop by Booth #329 and say hello to the team.
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.

ISYS Search Software today introduced its new 2009 Enterprise Access Suite by officially launching its ISYS Anywhere mobile enterprise search server. As a whole, the 2009 Enterprise Access Suite is comprised of a core set of embedded search and infrastructure solutions for information access, management and reuse. ISYS Anywhere specifically addresses the common pain of the mobile workforce … namely all the tools for conducting work remotely EXCEPT for the ability to search and retrieve key data from the field.
ISYS Anywhere is especially signficant as it merges all content repositories (from locally stored information to server data) into a single point of access. This includes the ability to search email, individual PCs, business applications and more from a Blackberry, iPhone or any browser-enabled device. Alternate solutions to date have addressed either desktop data or server content, but not both.
The full details of our new suite can be found via our official press release, via EContent Magazine’s coverage or in the technology section of our website.

We have the good fortune to work with a number of great companies operating in the legal industry. Reveal, an end-to-end e-discovery solutions provider, is the latest to come on board, and we’re excited to be working with them on their hosted e-discovery review platform.
Reveal selected the ISYS Integration Kit to embed search into its platform, which enables the company to roll out high-performance indexing, advanced search refinement and content mining, and several other options such as hit-highlighting, which helps deliver greater efficiency and accuracy to the review process. You can learn more about our new partnership by reading our “Reveal Selects ISYS Embedded Search for E-Discovery Platform” press release.
We also invite you to learn more about our embedded search software, which has served the OEM search needs of organizations that include EMC, HP and Autodesk.

Earlier in the year we introduced you to the new member of our family of embedded search and access solutions: ISYS File Readers. Today we are pleased to update you on one of our first ISYS File Readers partners: Lucid Imagination. We’re particularly excited about this partnership, as anyone who is following search knows the serious “street cred” Lucid Imagination has been garnering as of late.
In much the same way that our ISYS File Readers are disrupting the market for document filters, Lucid Imagination is shaking up the enterprise search industry and getting companies to look at information access in a whole new light. With some of Apache Lucene/Solr’s key contributors leading Lucid Imagination, the company is making waves, and ISYS is pleased to now provide them with a critical piece to their offering. We encourage you to learn more about Lucid Imagination, read up on our ISYS File Readers document filtering technology, and review what some of the industry’s leading analysts are saying about our partnership:
* CMSWatch: Lucene can read almost anything: Lucid and ISYS team up
* Beyond Search: Lucid Imagination Offers Connectors to Lucene Solr Systems
* CMSWire: Lucid Imagination, ISYS Partner to Integrate Lucene, Solr and Document Filtering

The ISYS Dev Team strikes again with its second major release of 2009 — ISYS:sdk 9. Designed to provide OEMs and ISVs with best-in-class integrated search solutions, the new ISYS:sdk delivers significantly enhanced power and scalability, de-duplication, parametric search and more. There’s no question that OEM search activity is heating up, and we’ll be posting some of our most recent wins in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we invite you to read the ISYS:sdk 9 press release.
As you know, the ISYS:sdk already has a number of high-end partners using the technology in their applications, including EMC, HP, Autodesk, Metafile, WORLDOX, Aderant and more. You can learn more about this technology by reviewing our ISYS:sdk brochure.