Posts Tagged ‘Enterprise Search’

01: ISYS Upgrades Enterprise Search Software to v9.6

Today we bring you fantastic news that Version 9.6 of the ISYS Enterprise Search Software suite is now available.  Noted below are just a handful of the key enhancements, including automatic language detection, early binding security and significant increases in indexing performance.  Maintenance customers wishing to upgrade or parties interested in learning more can visit our ISYS 9.6 overview page and request additional information.

For this cycle, we focused on capabilities that would meet next-generation federated search requirements.  Given our exclusive focus on enterprise search infrastructure and embedded search solutions, we identified the following three areas as key to our customers’ success:

Language Support
To ease the findability of critical corporate intelligence, we introduced Automatic Language Detection, which instantly recognizes documents in 36 different languages. The benefit to end users is the ability to refine results based on a given language, or include a pre-query filter to restrict searches to a specific language. Also new in 9.6 is the ability to extend stemming to French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Security
To cater for broad security requirements, ISYS has introduced “early binding” document-level security for file systems, which ensures:

• High-performance secure search (no penalty for filtering unauthorized documents)
• Result counts are 100% accurate on the first result page
• Refinement facets only available for authorized documents

Performance
In lab tests using a typical mix of corporate content, ISYS 9.6 achieved indexing speeds of 100 gigabytes per hour. Our enhancements at the text extraction level have enabled us to see an average indexing speed increase of 3x.

Learn more about ISYS 9.6 and request additional information.

02: Ben Franklin and the Evolution of Enterprise Search

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.

03: Open Source Search – Ready For Prime Time?

Well… it really depends on who you are and where you are. In the US, vendors like Lucid Imagination are making a business out of the support of Lucene/Solr. There are even commercial search vendors developing products off a Lucene base. Open source search outside the US is not as prevalent. We see it to some degree in Europe, but not in Asia Pacific. When IT budgets are tight, doing some prototype development with open source to prove the merits of a business case certainly has value. Just make sure you are clear on the end goal of that prototype. Turning a prototype into a final commercial product only works if the technology was selected correctly in the first place. A lot of prototyping technology is designed specifically to generate a prototype, and do it quickly. Moving to a final product requires something different again.

But back to the original question…it really comes down to a question of your company’s appetite for risk. At a recent conference, the CIO of a large financial institution was talking about her attitude to open source in general. In her words – when something goes wrong you can’t hold the open source developer community accountable; sometimes you just need a commercial entity in there with you that you can put some pressure on, the “one throat to choke” so to speak.

Now you may be in a company that does embrace open source and is willing to tolerate the General Public License (GPL) aspects. If this is the case and you have enough expertise in house to deal with anything that goes wrong, then perhaps it is for you. If you do go down the Open Source Search route, be sure to come talk to us about the ISYS File Readers. The availability of document filters is clearly a key area of open source search that’s not ready for prime time.

04: Security for federated search

Thank you to all those who commented on the recent post, and as a number of you pointed out, yes, security is a challenge in an environment with multiple data repositories. Stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper that will tell you everything you need to know about security in a federated search environment. We’ll do our best to have it out by the end of January!

05: 2010 – the year of Federated Enterprise Search?

How the landscape has changed…ten years ago we had many different file types, but not many places to store them. Today, we have fewer file types, but many more repositories – add the complexity of the different security models into the mix and clearly the focus of enterprise search is changing. It is good to see the issue of federated search finally being raised, witness recent articles in the likes of Information Week.

The question that enterprises need to ask is who is best placed to provide true federated search? My opinion is that it is not the owner of any one of the repositories —  it is those companies that have an independent view of data. We will be hearing more about this issue in 2010 as our customers demand better access to information, and don’t care what email system of document repository their data resides in.

06: Webinar: The Changing Face of Search

ISYS is hosting a webinar this week (Thursday, Sept. 17, at Noon Eastern). The topic is “The Changing Face of Enterprise Search and Information Access.” The theme centers around the notion that search is rapidly evolving from being solely a front-end productivity tool into a dynamic, back-end intelligence engine.

Joining us to lend their insights into this topic are:

* Leslie Owens, Analyst, Forrester Research
* Brian Pinkerton, Chief Architect, Lucid Imagination
* Kevin Reester, CTO, Reveal

We’d love to have you join us for this discussion. You can register here.

07: Searching Google Patents With ISYS

We recently partnered with ArnoldIT on a demonstration site that enables visitors to search 10 years of Google Patents using the ISYS:web search solution for enterprise search, intranet search and site search.  ArnoldIT officially announced the new site today.  For the Google Patent Search demonstration site, we unlocked a handful of advanced search, discovery and mining capabilities (what Steve Arnold refers to as “beyond search” functions).  These include: parametric search; context clouds; intelligent query expansion; auto-classification; ISYS Entities; and metadata refinement.

We invite you to visit the Google Patent Search demonstration site and give it a try for yourself.  You can also try it in your own environment by visiting our website and requesting an evaluation of the ISYS:web search solution.

08: CMSWatch Search Report Updated

The folks over at CMSWatch released its “cross-check” of the 2009 Search Report.  We encourage you to check it out, as it’s one of the more in-depth information access report available.

With all due respect to the great search team at CMSWatch, we do have to highlight that the lag between vendor interviews and when the report is published is somewhat disappointing.  We certainly understand the massive challenge they face in keeping on top of this fast-moving, crowded market, but we all can appreciate just how much changes in this space over the course of nine months.

The pace of innovation and growth at ISYS is the highest it has been in our 20-year history.  As you follow this blog over the course of 2009, we’re confident you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about.  We very much look forward to briefing the CMSWatch team on what we’ve been up to since June 2008.  In the meantime, we invite you to review the report and then call ISYS to learn about the latest and greatest.

09: Interview With ISYS CEO Scott Coles

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.

10: Analysts Point to ISYS

In the last two weeks, ISYS has had the privilege of landing on a handful analysts’ radars.  On Sept. 30, 2008, Gartner Inc. announced its 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, where ISYS is listed among many of the key players in the market.

Gilbane Group’s Lynda Moulton mentioned ISYS in a recent blog post, where she espoused the virtues of the nimble search players.  ISYS has long advocated an “iterative” approach to search, so we’re pleased to see the analyst community put some substance behind a philosophy we strongly encourage.

And finally, the venerable Steve Arnold was gracious enough to relay how he uses ISYS as one of his key tools for Google patent analysis.  Many folks know the fine work Steve has done tracking the GOOG, and it’s an honor to know ISYS plays a small role in his sought-after research.