ISYS Blog
So Long, and Thanks for All the Text
Posted by mark.vadgama on 20 March 2012
With the announcement of our Lexmark deal, the future looks to be an incredibly exciting place for ISYS.
In the 23 years since I wrote the prototype of what was to become ISYS, I’ve had the distinct honour of working with some truly exceptional people. In fact, it’s one of the key rewards in starting your own software business.
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve all achieved with the technology and the business, and feel humbled that we have a cadre of people who’ve seen fit to work at ISYS for more than ten years. We even have customers who have been with us for more than 20.
But all offspring must eventually grow up and leave home, and so it is with software companies as well.
One doesn’t want one’s progeny going off with just anyone, and that’s why I’m particularly pleased about the new Lexmark/Perceptive ownership. There’s a comfortable cultural fit between ISYS, its history and people, and the fine people at Lexmark we’ve had the pleasure of getting to know over recent months.
ISYS the technology and ISYS the people will benefit and grow in directions I could barely have imagined, and I’m personally excited and enthused at the prospect.
BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR ENTERPRISE SEARCH ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION
Posted by mark.vadgama on 8 March 2012
To understand the financial benefits of implementing Enterprise Search software, we need to look at the way in which information is managed and accessed across organizations; and the type of data that is being stored.
Data can be broken up into two categories: structured and unstructured. Structured data resides in databases with tables that can be readily queried. Unstructured data (like emails, documents, presentations andPDFs) are inherently more difficult to query - the contents rarely fit into a nice table and context needs to be applied to make meaning of this huge asset. In relation to making the business case for Enterprise Search, it is unstructured data that represents the real source of efficiency gains and future business value.
Most organizations will have a number of different repositories where unstructured data is stored, including email servers, shared drives, document management systems, intranets, extranets and corporate websites. Finding a piece of information here may require a specific search within each repository. It's that familiar problem: you're looking for a customer contract, an email, a spreadsheet or a presentation. You find yourself repeating the same search in each system. But getting different results each time, and with different levels of difficulty. Compounding the problem is the issue that (according to an IDC study, "The High Cost of Not Finding Information"), up to half those information searches end without result.
In business, having the right information at the right time can mean the difference between success and failure. For government departments, there are likely to be compliance risks associated with failed searches, such as FOI or GIPA requests.
Making the business case for an Enterprise Search solution is relatively straightforward. How much time, effort and upside can be gained from providing each employee with the ability to accurately and securely search every information repository in the organization through a simple, intuitive and customizable web-style search page?
In its report, IDC concluded that Enterprise Search offers companies the prospect of major reductions in costs. It goes on to detail how managers can calculate the benefits for their organization. The statistics are impressive. IDC estimates that an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers can save up to $3.5 million per year, with an opportunity potential of up to $15 million per year.
An ISYS Enterprise Search software implmentation will typically take around 5-10 days. This means that a return on the technology investment can be achieved in a matter of weeks, or months - a big selling point and commercial advantage for organizations.
With an estimated ninety percent of the world's data being created in the last two years alone, it's clear that organizations today are literally drowning in information. High performance Enterprise Search software - whether deployed directly or embedded as part of another enterprise-wide solution - is demonstrating its business value across every industry sector and customer type. Small wonder that the technology is now assuming greater importance on the strategic IT agenda for organizations needing to boost productivity, reduce costs, minimize risk and grow revenues.
As the demand for Enterprise Search increases, organizations are able to better find, extract and utilize their information assets - improving the speed and accuracy of decision-making. Which in turn is enabling the same organizations to become more agile, more competitive, and more successful.
At a strategic market level, it's interesting to note that global IT giants like Oracle, HP and Microsoft have all made large-scale acquisitions in the Enterprise Search space, underlining the significance of the technology within the broader enterprise IT solutions ecosystem. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for FAST (which they folded into their SharePoint offering). Oracle paid $1 billion for Endeca. And only last year, HP paid a whopping $10.3 billion for Autonomy.
What impact these acquisitions will have on the core Enterprise Search capabilities of these companies remains to be seen, now they are part of a much bigger conglomerate. But one thing is clear. It's all very well generating and capturing lots of data, but people right across the organization need to be able to extract value from it.
The business case for Enterprise Search has never been clearer.
THE DAYS OF THE TRADITIONAL CMO ARE NUMBERED
Posted by mark.vadgama on 21 February 2012
The start of a new year inevitably brings with it a wave of new CMO appointments. For 2012, we saw new hires at Macy’s, Facebook, Kenneth Cole and McDonald’s (Australia/ NZ). Leaving aside the particular circumstances of these and other similar appointments, there are two significant drivers that will increasingly shape the role of the CMO.
The first is about the fundamental shift in emphasis that Marketing must adopt to align it more productively with the needs of the business; and what this means in terms of the emerging breed of marketer. The second has been defined by CMOs themselves as the major issue of concern for marketers today; and one that can only properly be addressed by the type of marketer that is truly business-aligned, as it requires an evolved set of skills, capabilities and relationships not always associated with the profession.
In the ‘Global Marketing Effectiveness Report’ published last year by the Fournaise Marketing Group, the unmistakable message from CEOs was that they expected their senior marketers to “use their marketing budget to deliver business growth for the organization.” The problem is, however, that CEOs had “no idea” if their marketers delivered the business growth that management and stakeholders were looking for. CEOs complained that their marketers were:
- Not thinking enough like businesspeople, and focusing too much instead on the creative, “arty” and “fluffy” side of marketing
- Bombarding them with lots of data, but none that related to, or meant anything for the company’s P&L
- Asking for more Marketing spend, but with no clear rationale for how much incremental business this would generate
- Constantly talking about Brand, Brand value, Brand equity and other similar parameters that are almost impossible to relate back to sales, revenue, EBIT or even market valuation
- Focusing on the latest marketing trends, but without demonstrating how these trends would help generate more business for the company
- Understanding CEO requests to increase Marketing ROI to mean cost-cutting through improved economies of scale, or negotiations with agencies and third parties
When they looked at the operating styles of marketers globally, Fournaise identified two main types: Traditional Marketers and ROI Marketers.
Traditional Marketers currently represent the majority (around 80 per cent). But they are the very people in whom CEOs globally are losing faith. They see themselves as brand builders over the medium to long term. For them, it is about creating awareness and interest through creativity and media – which explains their continual focus on the ‘next big trend’ and the importance they attach to their advertising and media agencies. Although Traditional Marketers may spend a lot of time gathering and analyzing data, they find it hard to translate the data into meaningful, business-oriented actions. They may talk about marketing ROI, but the reality is that they have yet to clearly identify what that actually means. Nor can they spell out how investment in Brand directly links back to a clear commercial return.
ROI Marketers make up the remaining 20 per cent. But they represent a growing minority. These practitioners constantly track and maximize their cross-channel marketing strategies and campaigns to drive business growth. They speak the language of their management and stakeholders. For them, marketing is about generating incremental customer demand. Pragmatic and data driven, ROI Marketers take decisions based on effectiveness, not the latest ‘cool’ trend.
The distinction in how the two types of marketer approach and use data is an important one, and assumes greater significance in the context of the issue which, according to IBM’s Global CMO Study in 2011, is the biggest area of concern today for marketers: Big Data.
Big Data is properly defined as a set of technologies designed to collect, manage, mine and analyze large collections of information to solve complex problems. For marketers needing to make informed and time-critical decisions, particular challenges are likely to include:
- Collecting and merging different types of data from multiple sources (e.g. brand, revenue, buying data, social media chatter, customer feedback, emails, presentations)
- High volumes of data (size and/ or rate) that are dynamic and changing, rather than static
- Unpredictable content (i.e. no apparent schema or structure)
- Real time (or near real time) collection, analysis and access
Traditionally, CMOs would have looked to their company's IT function to provide the technology and specialist support required to collect and analyze data on this kind of scale. However, to quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changing.
Most of the content generated today is ‘unstructured’, such as emails, presentations, documents and video. Unstructured content cannot be managed and processed by conventional database systems. Today, that content accounts for something like 80 per cent of all the information generated inside organizations - and the vast majority of it by employees. It is typically stored in multiple formats and versions across many different areas of the organization – on servers, local networks, the public and private cloud, desktops, laptops and even mobile devices.
With information stored across different platforms and silos, it becomes extremely difficult for marketers to get a comprehensive understanding of all the data that may be available, and to determine what information is most useful. Ideally, CMOs would want to be able to gather market and customer intelligence onto a single platform in a simplified, automated way that empowers immediate business decisions.
Fortunately, there is an effective solution. New search-enabled technologies (like those provided by ISYS) provide the business with a complete view of all the information it has, without the need to purchase more storage and computing power.
These embedded technologies integrate seamlessly with the company’s existing enterprise systems (like Microsoft SharePoint and HP TRIM) to provide powerful, text data search, analytics, extraction and viewing capabilities. Visual mapping tools mean that relationships between pieces of information can be identified, opening up further areas of investigation and insight. Intuitive and customizable user interfaces that replicate the simplicity and ease of web-based search enable marketers to quickly find and share any piece of information they need, when they need it – regardless of its storage location, format or age. Boosting productivity, eliminating hours of wasted time; and facilitating real (or near real time) decision-making.
Delivering true information relevance and accuracy also addresses a wider, business-critical issue. Data security and compliance are issues that historically have tended to fall within the scope of IT and/ or Legal. But the trend towards more stringent data protection regulations is likely to mean stricter breach notification requirements, bigger fines and more headaches for organizations that fail to adequately protect private data. With marketers increasingly at the heart of enterprise data management and usage, CMOs today cannot afford to simply leave this issue to IT or Legal, as they risk falling foul of data regulation and compliance rules.
In practice, defining and implementing appropriate procedures for data acquisition, usage, storage, security and accessibility will mean a much closer working relationship between CMO and CIO than has previously been the case.
At the same time, the deployment of new search-enabled enterprise applications will not only enable the ROI-driven CMO to access and leverage all of the marketing intelligence available to them; it will also help foster greater alignment between Marketing and the rest of the organization.
Just as we are approaching a tipping point in how organizations address the challenges and opportunities of Big Data, so we are starting to see a fundamental evolution in the role of CMO. The days of the Traditional Marketer are numbered.
Big Data (and the new search-enabled technologies that are emerging to address it) today provide the platform on which ROI Marketers can unequivocally demonstrate their value to the wider business; help break down traditional functional silos; and make better informed decisions more often and with a much higher degree of certainty.
IS 'BIG DATA' REAL?
Posted by mark.vadgama on 17 February 2012
Or perhaps to add a little more detail to the question. Is the notion of Big Data real, or is it a source of food for under-nourished vendors in hungry times?
Let me go a step further. Would I ask a question, as a vendor, that might be considered as ‘heresy’ within the software space?
Allow me to answer the second question first.
I like to be objective and, for whatever reason, I was born with a deep-rooted sense of fairness. So whilst I applaud the efforts of those vendors that seek to provide a technology solution to a challenging business problem, I have little time for those simply seeking to put a ‘spin’ on their products because they want to be part of the ‘next wave’. You are either on the bus, or you are not. Running alongside shouting you want to get on but can’t open the door doesn’t count.
The other reason I think the question should be asked is not about me, or my views, but in relation to software history.
I remember a theme called ‘Decision Support’. The idea being that certain tools would provide access to, and represent data in ways that would make it easier to take decisions quickly and safely. It took off to a certain degree, but not as much as I suspect people hoped. So, when one buzzword (or two) won’t do, another is needed – and we got Data Warehousing.
No, I hear you say, that is not the same as decision support – and I agree to an extent. But it is pretty close in some ways, and since the demise of one phrase coincided with the birth of another, we can take the cynical line and assume one is a ‘smarketing’ (new term for sales and marketing) substitution for another.
So is Big Data real?
Well, the case for it is that there is a lot of data out there and it is multiplying at an alarming rate. As an industry, we have provided a range of tools over time which have allowed our customers to generate produce more and more data. Historically, most of that was transactional, structured data. But over the last 20 years or so, we have seen the steady growth of unstructured data; and most recently the huge uptake of social media, which has resulted in an explosion of that same unstructured data – not all of it valuable and/ or meaningful. In the concept of ‘Big Data’, however, it is the quantity and diversity rather than the quality which has become the issue.
The case against Big Data relies once again on history. Massive volumes of data have been a reality for some time. But the term ‘Big Data’ has only recently appeared, coinciding with the global economic downturn and the need for vendors of high volume/ high value information processing and analytics software to find a new way to market their offerings, and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by perceived issues around data.
There are without doubt more tools available. But equally those companies with ‘Big Data’ problems have been getting by for years. Humans are like that. We always seem to find a way to cope, even if it is not always ideal.
Nevertheless, those who have been getting by have done so with structured information only. Today, the problem has changed. The real Big Data issue is in relation to the unstructured content that employees are generating in huge volumes. Yet the market is typically looking at reincarnated data warehousing approaches, or Big Data ‘wannabees’, to solve the problem of unstructured content – and they can’t.
The Big Data problem will be best addressed by companies that have a deep understanding of unstructured data and the technology to deal with it, whilst incorporating structured data into the equation. This provides both the scalability and the architectural capability necessary for the solution to real Big Data problems.
So what’s the conclusion?
Big Data is real, but it is not what the bulk of the vendor community seem to think it is, or want it to be.
Perhaps the age of unstructured data has finally arrived, because of Big Data…
WHAT THE SAP AGREEMENT MEANS FOR ISYS
Posted by Bob Smith on 2 February 2012
Well, quite a bit has been written in recent weeks about the global OEM agreement that ISYS secured with software giant SAP. Much of the comment has understandably been technical in nature, as well as what it means for the SAP products that are embedding ISYS Document Filters and Big Data as a driving force in Text Analytics.
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.
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BIG DATA: ISYS WEBCAST WITH IDC
Posted by Dave Haucke on 19 September 2011
All organizations keep a close watch on their assets - money in the bank, real estate, employees, equipment, orders, deliveries and intellectual property (like patents, trademarks and licenses). Many even seek to measure the asset value of their brands.
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'.
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A NEW LOOK FOR A NEW ERA
Posted by mark.vadgama on 31 August 2011
For more than two decades, ISYS has continued to invest and innovate in its core IP, in line with customer requirements. This has enabled our technology to work in the most demanding of business environments.
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.
CHARTING THE HP – AUTONOMY DEAL
Posted by Scott Coles on 23 August 2011
If you have been following the coverage of HP's proposed acquisition of Autonomy, then you've likely picked up on a handful of repeated phrases, including "big data" "data science" and "information management." Some terms are new, some are old, but each describes what enterprises are increasingly wrestling to control and leverage – namely, unstructured information. As HP looks to its software future while shedding its hardware past, it’s clear it views Autonomy as the first piece in addressing the big data problem.
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)
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WELCOME MICHAEL NEISWENDER
Posted by Scott Coles on 19 August 2011
ISYS is delighted to welcome Michael Neiswender to our expanding technology partner Sales team. Michael will be instrumental in building on the commercial success we have already achieved with our proprietary Document Filters technology. Previously with Autonomy and a true industry veteran, Michael brings a wealth of experience and relationships to the business as we embark on an exciting period in our history. We will continue to focus on delivering high-performance enterprise search solutions based on true innovation and world-class IP – free from any wider distractions. Our customers and prospects would expect nothing less.
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OBSESSED WITH PERFORMANCE FOR 23 YEARS
Posted by Ian Davies on 1 August 2011
If a week is a long time in politics, then 23 years is a lifetime in the software business.
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.
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