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.

This information is required for regulatory reasons and to enable the Board of Directors to manage the organization effectively.

However, very few have any kind of measure for the amount of information they have, even though this represents a fundamental asset of today’s organization.  Think of all the information residing in documents, emails, intranet, website, blogs and wikis.  Do you know how much potentially valuable data you have?  If you had to find business-critical data, could you find precisely what you need easily, quickly and to the level of detail you wanted?

Join ISYS and IDC’s Sue Feldman for a webcast on the topic of “Tackling Big Data:  Information Assets as a Competitive Advantage.”  During this session, Sue and ISYS CMO Mark Vadgama will discuss the state of information management, the challenges inherent in the explosion of unstructured content, and the methods and approaches today’s leading enterprises are employing to tackle ‘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

Whilst watching a re-run recently of ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, it struck me that we are approaching a genuine watershed – a tipping point if you like – in relation to how organizations can, and ultimately must, respond to what I’d describe as the Third Information Age. 

If we turn the clock back, the First Information Age was arguably characterized by a relative scarcity of information for organizations, along with the technical challenges of capturing and using it.

In the (current) Second Age, we have witnessed the explosion of new digital media and content channels, platforms and devices. In this scenario, the challenge for organizations has been in trying to manage all of the huge volumes of unstructured information that are being generated and shared every single day.

But I believe a Third Age is now dawning. Here, organizations will acknowledge the ultimate futility of trying to manage what I’d term as escalating ‘information inflation’. Not simply the sheer volume and diversity of information being created, but the associated increase in human, technology and organizational costs of trying to manage what is essentially unmanageable.

A point is being reached where the costs of directly tackling this information inflation outweigh the business benefits.

Far better, smarter (and less costly) is to make information inflation irrelevant. Accept that your organization cannot ultimately keep up with the spread of unstructured information and instead focus resources on how best to intelligently search and extract what you need from the ‘chaos’.

The information genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and won’t go back in.

So, stop worrying about it and instead think about how your organization can turn the genie to your advantage.

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.