We’d like to kick off 2009 by wishing everyone a prosperous year.  Be sure to bookmark our blog, as 2009 will be a busy and exciting year for your ISYS friends.  We’ll keep track of it all right here.

The experts over at New Idea Engineering recently interviewed ADD Systems, an ISYS customer doing some great things with search.  Read up on it, then contact us to discuss your own 2009 search needs.  ISYS takes great pride in its customer interactions, so don’t hesitate to put us to the test.  We’ll spend as much time as it takes to get you squared away and “cooking with gas.”

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!

If you’re a regular reader of Lynda Moulton’s Enterprise Search blog for the Gilbane Group, you’re no doubt familiar with the recent research work she’s done on the industry and its players.  I’m sure Lynda has ample physical evidence to support how much work she and her team put into this (copious research notes, gallons of coffee and many sleepless nights, we’re sure), but the end product is quite comprehensive and informative.

In the report, you’ll find “practical guidance about product evaluation, selection, implementation, deployment and maintenance.”  A terrific “Getting Started” guide for anyone currently evaluating search, information access and discovery technologies.

Get your copy here, and then contact us with your questions.

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.

When we released ISYS:desktop 8 two years ago, it was the first enterprise-class desktop search solution to offer categorization and entity extraction. Today, we release ISYS:desktop 9 and raise the enterprise search bar even higher. Continuing our focus on delivering a broad set of capabilities that industry consultant Steve Arnold refers to as “beyond search,” ISYS:desktop 9 enhancements include:

• Timeline refinement bar, which highlights hit density in the form of a histogram and enables users to hone in on a specific date range using the click-and-drag sliders on either end of the timeline.
• Parametric refinement, which rounds out our category and entity clusters, giving users the ability to refine their results based on commonly recurring metadata fields and values, such as document author or the “From:” field in an email.
• Results Flagging, which supports discovery efforts by enabling users to flag results of interest and perform custom actions on just the flagged content.
• Centralized Management, for configuring and deploying ISYS:desktop across hundreds and even thousands of PCs, all from a single location.
• Tabbed searching, for analyzing multiple queries in parallel.

We invite you to learn more about the newest member to the ISYS suite of enterprise search and download an evaluation version. We look forward to your thoughts.

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.