As more channels of information open, search becomes more complex as the opportunity for information silos increases. I recently spoke with Paul Doscher, US CEO of Exalead. Exalead has introduced its CloudView product line to address this issue. Paul said that one of the key challenges in enterprise information access is that content exists locally on a variety of devices; behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems; and outside the firewall with partners, SaaS applications and on the Web. He said that the future of information management requires the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, structured, semi-structured and unstructured information sources. 

CloudView is not a SaaS solution. The name refers to the industry-wide shift to housing data in a large number of silos, or “data clouds.” This creates the demand for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. Paul gave me several examples of the scalability that CloudView offers. The Sanger Institute, a research group, has stored over 1.5 billion documents and adds 160 million new documents every two months. CloudView is able to keep up wit this effort and provides access to all of this information.

CloudView also allows for adjustments to handle peak time searches. The Rightmove, a UK real estate listing service that handles ove r90% of UK real estate gets peak traffic during lunch and CloudView scales up to handle over 400 queries per second. American Greeting, the card company, also scales up for their holiday traffic.

We covered the origins of Exalead. It started in Paris in 2000 with some of the founders coming from Alta Vista. They have a web search tool like Google that is used in widely in France and other parts of Europe.  They have had a US presence since 2005 but it operated on a small scale as a sales channel. Now they are greatly expanding their US operations to go after the North American market with their new CloudView line. Exalead is focusing on three main markets segments in this expansion: online businesses, large enterprises, and OEM. It is built on open standards for greater flexibility in these markets.

Some of the CloudView features include: business level tuning and management of the search experience, ability to extend Business Intelligence applications to textual search, WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows, full traceability within the product, and a provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for 3rd party implementations.

In addition to their OEM product and the standalone enterprise search edition, Exalead offers a 360 edition information access development platform.  This platform allows companies to build applications that integrate information sources with both structured and unstructured data. For example, an integrated call center application built on CloudView could pull from multiple data sources to simplify information access and reduce retrieval times.

Paul pointed out the Exalead has been running a popular web search engine for years and has learned how to handle scalability and other development issues through this effort. I took a look at their web search product, Exalead. It is appealing as you have greater ability to quickly focus your search than Google. You can also personalize a series of short cuts. In addition, Exalead provides a picture of the web site along with the results.  All of these are good features.

I like their move in the enterprise market.  There is plenty of opportunity here. It will be interesting to see how they progress.