"Googlizing" BI with Search-Based Applications

Unstructured data holds essential business insights. How can you get to that insight?

• June 8, 2011 @tdwi.org   http://bit.ly/ln0ubT

By Eric Rogge, Sr. Director of Marketing, Exalead

Organizations are increasingly storing vast amounts of unstructured data in new Hadoop, NoSQL, and MPP analytic databases, and business intelligence tools are getting better about connecting with them.
Still, even with improving connections between BI and unstructured data stores, the challenge with today's business intelligence deployments is that they only enable quantitative analysis of a fraction of an enterprises' information assets. That's because the majority of information available to an enterprise is unstructured content held in documents, e-mail messages, collaboration forums, and on the Web.

Enterprises now realize that to have a complete, 360-degree view of their operations, they need to analyze that unstructured data. That analysis involves both qualitative assessments as well as quantitative analytics. The challenge of BI isn't storing the unstructured data; it is the significant back-end development work needed to gather and quantify unstructured information sources.

Missing from an enterprise's portfolio of BI tools are search and semantic processing technology, which can efficiently process unstructured data into gists and metrics, plus handle large volumes of data from widely dispersed sources.

The effectiveness of today's BI solutions can be improved by working in conjunction with search-based applications (SBAs). SBAs are a new, emerging category of search and semantic technology that aim to improve operational productivity through processing, analysis, and delivery of key information drawn from internal and Web unstructured data. SBAs are a form of business intelligence and complement the highly quantitative analytics delivered by traditional BI products.
Search-based applications complement the ad hoc analysis and quantitative reporting typical of BI implementations. Where BI addresses the what questions, SBAs address the who, how, and why questions to give qualitative cause-and-effect explanations. They do this by collecting and co-displaying quantitative metrics and explanatory text in the same view. SBAs are also useful for extracting customer sentiment and other informational trends from the Internet -- a complex task beyond the capabilities of traditional BI.

By integrating semantic search-based applications with BI information sources (sometimes called the "Googlization of BI"), companies gain a broader understanding of their business activity that enables better business decisions to be made faster. Instead of using a single source of data as with traditional BI, SBAs can simultaneously access a wide variety of information sources while combining structured and unstructured data to provide a holistic, 360-degree view of the enterprise.

SBAs handle staggering amounts of data -- petabytes in some use cases -- while simultaneously providing Web-search-style, natural-language query interfaces that appeal to ordinary users. Today's workers, accustomed to fast and easy Google searches on the Web, can now gain the same easy-to-use tools to help them unlock information in the enterprise and gain insights for better decision making.

Read more @tdwi.org http://bit.ly/ln0ubT

Sage innovates with Exalead CloudView to Enhance Its ERP User Experience

Press Release:
Sage innovates with Exalead CloudView to Enhance Its ERP User Experience

VÉLIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France – May 26, 2011 – Exalead, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) and a global provider of search and information access software for the enterprise and the Web, and The Sage Group PLC, the world’s number three ERP vendor, today announced that Sage has selected Exalead CloudView to power the new Sage Search offering in its Sage ERP X3 suite (version 6.2+).

More than 6.3 million companies and organizations around the world rely on Sage’s software and services to help them better manage the processes at the core of their business. This success is due to the fact that Sage delivers high business value in solutions that are simple to use, rapid to implement and cost effective. It is a winning formula that is maintained by continual innovation, as is demonstrated by Sage’s decision to power its new Sage Search option for Sage ERP X3 with Exalead CloudView.

CloudView brings the speed and simplicity of consumer Web search to the Sage ERP X3 user experience, offering flexible natural language search across all Sage database content, including both data and metadata. Offered as a simple drag-and-drop Gadget in the Sage portal, CloudView-powered Sage Search enables users to locate information anywhere in the system using a single text box: no training, complex forms or SQL queries required. Moreover, fuzzy matching and flexible search refinement by dynamic results categories help ensure search success even when a user's query is incomplete, misspelled or imprecise.

Equally important to the user experience in Sage’s decision was the ease and smoothness with which CloudView could be integrated into the SAGE X3 platform. This technical advantage, together with the robustness of the platform and the responsiveness of the Exalead team, sealed the decision for Sage.

"We evaluated a wide range of search solutions, and without a doubt, CloudView delivers a great user experience, innovative search technology, top performance and easy integration. We believe our mutual customers will greatly benefit from native search capabilities, accelerating ERP user adoption even more." said Emmanuel Obadia Sr. Vice President Sage ERP X3. "We’re also positively impressed with the quality of support we’ve received from the Exalead team."

"This is a wonderfully satisfying collaboration for us. Our technology is designed to reveal the richness of information assets in systems everywhere, and to enable users to enter into a natural, two-way conversation with information," explains Laurent Couillard, CEO of Exalead. "This partnership aligns perfectly with these objectives and it is rewarding to join forces with an organization that shares our passion for usability and our commitment to innovation."

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About The Sage Group plc

The Sage Group plc is a leading global supplier of business management software and related products and services, principally for small to medium-sized enterprises. Formed in 1981, Sage was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989. Sage has more than 6 million customers and 13,600 employees worldwide. We operate in over 24 countries covering the UK, Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia, India and China. For further information please visit www.sage.com

 

About Sage ERP X3 (http://www.sageerpx3.com)

Sage ERP X3 is a dedicated solution for mid-market and larger companies with international demands enables its clients to transform and perform through technologies. Over 3,000 customers representing 165,000 users worldwide already chose Sage ERP X3 because it is easy to use, fast to deploy and cost effective. For more than 10 years Sage ERP X3 has been a proven and comprehensive ERP solution addressing mid-market companies specific requirements and challenges in various industries from manufacturing, services to distribution and many more. Sage ERP X3 is present in 53 countries and counts a network of more than 1,500 Sage professionals and 200 partners in its ecosystem.

 

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead website: www.exalead.com/software
Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in June 2010. Exalead has offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

 

About Dassault Systèmes

As a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries. A pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes applications provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling. The Dassault Systèmes portfolio consists of CATIA for designing the virtual product - SolidWorks for 3D mechanical design - DELMIA for virtual production - SIMULIA for virtual testing - ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, and 3DVIA for online 3D lifelike experiences. For more information, visit http://www.3ds.com.

Dubai Police Select Dassault Systèmes’ Exalead to Improve Access to Oracle Database System

Press release:
Dubai Police Select Dassault Systèmes’ Exalead to Improve Access to Oracle Database System

VÉLIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France – May 12, 2011 – Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) announced today that its subsidiary, Exalead, the European leader in search and information access software for the enterprise and Web, has signed an agreement with the Dubai Police through Taya IT, Exalead’s value-added reseller (VAR) for the region.

To aid in civil and criminal investigations, the Dubai Police maintain a large repository of critical data in an Oracle database system. At present, the continually growing repository includes approximately 35 million documents. To retrieve information from the system, police personnel were using the database’s built-in search utility. As the volume of data increased, the system began to experience serious performance issues. It could take the platform 30 to 45 minutes to process some queries, and competing information access and transaction processing demands were degrading overall database server performance. In addition, the search utility was rigid, returning only exact matches to precise user queries.

To address these usability and performance issues, the Dubai Police conducted extensive analysis and tests of search solutions on the market, finally selecting the solution proposed by Taya IT, Exalead CloudView integrated with Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) Support, as the optimum technology for meeting its needs. Now, police staff can retrieve data as rapidly and easily as they do information on the Web, using a single, familiar text box to launch any search, discovery or analysis task. Results are returned in a less than a second, with CloudView’s fuzzy matching technology and auto-categorization (clustering) of results boosting search success and staff efficiency. Moreover, by offloading routine information access requests from Oracle to CloudView, the agency is able to better manage its overall IT costs.

“We are very happy with the Exalead-based solution provided by Taya IT. We can now analyze millions of heterogeneous records in near real-time, which was just absolutely impossible to do in the past,” said Major Amer Sharaf, from Dubai Police.

“We are pleased to have provided Dubai Police staff with an innovative solution which will help them accomplish their daily law enforcement tasks,” states Wafik Shamma, CEO, Taya IT.

“Exalead is proving once again its extraordinary scalability and its ability to handle heterogeneous information in Arabic, and we are proud to welcome the Dubai Police as a new customer in the government sector,” remarks Laurent Couillard, CEO, Exalead.

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead website: www.exalead.com
Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in June 2010. Exalead has offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

 

About Dassault Systèmes

As a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries. A pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes applications provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling. The Dassault Systèmes portfolio consists of CATIA for designing the virtual product – SolidWorks for 3D mechanical design – DELMIA for virtual production – SIMULIA for virtual testing – ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, and 3DVIA for online 3D lifelike experiences. For more information, visit http://www.3ds.com.
CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SIMULIA, SolidWorks and 3D VIA are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries

Advanced linguistic analysis for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages

Press Release

Exalead and Basis Technology Partnership
Extends Capabilities of Exalead Information Access Platform
to Asian and Middle Eastern Languages

Advanced linguistic analysis for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages
improves search accuracy for Exalead CloudView EL (Extended Language) customers
Exalead, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), and Basis Technology today announced a partnership that integrates Basis Technology’s Rosette® linguistics platform into the newly released Exalead CloudView EL (Extended Language). By licensing the Rosette technology— for languages including linguistically complex Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu— CloudView EL will offer enhanced search capabilities and greater accuracy to corporate users in Asia and the Middle East.

CloudView EL is a unique information access platform that collects unstructured and structured data from any source and transforms it into a single, structured information resource for unified searches or for building next-generation search-based business applications.
CloudView EL draws on Rosette to apply language-specific text analysis to yield highly accurate and comprehensive search results. Rosette also performs morphological analysis of text and named entity extraction (people, places and organizations) in Asian and Middle Eastern languages, an essential step to achieve superior search recall and quality.

“We partnered with Basis Technology to extend our commitment to search excellence into Asia and the Middle East,” said Laurent Couillard, CEO of Exalead. “Rosette’s speed and textual analysis in a multitude of languages is a key piece in enabling our worldwide customers to unlock the hidden value of data across all sources and languages.”

“Accurate search is tightly linked with high-quality, language-specific text analysis,” Steve Cohen, COO of Basis Technology, said. “We are pleased that Exalead —one of the world’s most innovative search platforms—has chosen our linguistic technology to enhance their edge in the competitive search market.”

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About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead website: www.exalead.com
Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in June 2010. Exalead has offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

About Dassault Systèmes

As a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries. A pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes applications provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling. The Dassault Systèmes portfolio consists of CATIA for designing the virtual product - SolidWorks for 3D mechanical design - DELMIA for virtual production - SIMULIA for virtual testing - ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, and 3DVIA for online 3D lifelike experiences. For more information, visit http://www.3ds.com.
CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SIMULIA, SolidWorks and 3D VIA are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries.

French National Library Chooses Exalead to Accelerate Digital Revolution

Press Release

French National Library Chooses Exalead to Accelerate Digital Revolution

Strategic Choice Meets Today's Needs and Anticipates Those of Tomorrow

Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) announced today that its subsidiary, Exalead, a global provider of search and information access software for the enterprise and the Web, has been selected by the French National Library (BnF/Bibliothèque nationale de France) to provide the information access infrastructure for its "Gallica" digital library project. The BnF joins other prestigious French institutions in designating Exalead as its partner of choice in preserving and promoting the nation’s cultural assets in the digital age. These institutions include the French Office of the President (Elysée), the French Government News Agency (Journaux Officiels), the National Audiovisual Institute (INA/Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), and the French international news channel France 24.

Deploying an innovative and agile solution for information access is critical to the success of large scale digitization efforts like Gallica. To date, the BnF has digitized more than one million works, including books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings, and made them available to the public via its Gallica Web platform, gallica.bnf.fr. To ensure broad adoption of this rich resource by the public, and to ensure the long-term survivability of the cultural heritage Gallica embodies, the BnF knew it needed an information access strategy that could satisfy contemporary modes of accessing and consuming information, while ensuring adaptability to future evolutions. Therefore the BnF issued a call for bids and chose Exalead CloudView as the optimal solution for meeting its current and long term information access needs. Advanced linguistic and semantic features, high performance, and flexibility are among the strong points that lead the BnF to make this choice.

"The Gallica project is a model of innovation. It is breaking new ground in leveraging digital technologies to preserve a distinctive cultural heritage in a global age, and in providing dual access to both public domain and copyrighted digital material while fully respecting copyright law and authors’ rights," explains Laurent Couillard, CEO of Exalead. "It's the perfect challenge for the 21st century, and we're thrilled the BnF has chosen Exalead as its partner of choice to fulfill its visionary mission."

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About Dassault Systèmes

As a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries. A pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes applications provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling. The Dassault Systèmes portfolio consists of CATIA for designing the virtual product - SolidWorks for 3D mechanical design - DELMIA for virtual production - SIMULIA for virtual testing - ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, and 3DVIA for online 3D lifelike experiences. For more information, visit http://www.3ds.com.

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead website: www.exalead.com

Harness innovative search-based technologies for faster, higher quality matching of candidate and positions

Effective Recruiting in the Digital Era

Successfully matching candidates and positions in the digital era can require sifting through a staggering volume of disparate data spread across dozens of resources. Now, employment agencies, corporate recruiters and online job boards (e.g., Manpower, fish4 and Randstand) are using Exalead CloudViewTM to to simplify and accelerate this process while enabling higher quality results.

What is CloudView?

CloudView is a unified platform for information search, access and reporting, and the leading infrastructure platform for search-based business applications. It is also the only search engine designed from the ground up for both the enterprise and the Web, powering a 16 billion page public Web search engine and serving more than 100 million unique monthly visitors through its public and customer installations.

One-Stop Access to All Resources

CloudView can greatly simplify your candidate search process by first collecting all your data, regardless of location, volume or format, then automatically transforming it into a single structured resource you can search with remarkable efficacy. As a result, you can search multiple internal and external resources from a single text box—with no painful data integration—including:

·         Multiple resume databases and applicant tracking systems

·         Email messages, text files and PDF documents

·         Social networking, Intranet and Web sites

Automated Analytics

Semantic Enrichment of Data

CloudView also boosts the quality and relevancy of this unified content by mining it for embedded information that can be used to enhance and better categorize data. Embedded data can include:

·         Named entities (people, places, organizations, dates, etc.)

·         Key phrases and concepts

·         Hidden relationships and connections between resources

An Agile Base for Innovation

Beyond this immediate ROI, CloudView provides an agile base that can adapt as your needs evolve, supporting social search, mobile applications, map-based applications, multimedia content processing, workflow integration and real-time reporting.

Solution Advantages

Increase Revenue

·         Attract new clients with a technology differentiator

·         Augment existing client loyalty and revenue

Reduce Costs

·         Boost productivity while lowering IT and training costs

·         Deploy non-intrusively in just weeks for a rapid ROI

Please contact Mark Padginton on +61 447774803 if you wish to know more regarding Exalead CloudVIew.

Exalead Named KMWorld "100 Companies that Matter" For Sixth Straight Year

Press Release

San Francisco, Unites States – March 8, 2011

Exalead Named KMWorld "100 Companies that Matter" For Sixth Straight Year

Exalead CloudView 360 Brings Semantic Processing to Big Data

Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), today announced that its subsidiary Exalead, a global provider of search-based applications (SBA) technology, has been named a KMWorld "100 Companies that Matter" for the sixth straight year.

Exalead’s flagship search-based application platform, CloudView 360, enables enterprises to rapidly deploy highly scalable, yet easy-to-use information applications about any aspect of business activity. Information can be combined from any and all relevant enterprise applications, collaboration applications and the Web to give at-a-glance and detailed insight to the entire organization from front-line workers to top executives. By adopting CloudView 360 and the search-based applications, enterprises gain operational efficiency and customer service improvements.

"Search-based applications are the fastest growing segment of the search market today, and with good reason," said Sue Feldman, vice president for Search and Discovery Technologies at IDC. "These applications are built on a flexible, scalable search backbone like CloudView 360, then customized to incorporate knowledge of a business process. They are designed with specific users in mind, with a purposeful interface to enable easier interaction with information that is drawn seamlessly from multiple sources. The complexity of uniting disparate information and of finding the semantic relationships between documents and data is significant, but enterprises desperately need this ability. To do so, though, requires technology that goes beyond basic search to include semantic processing and text analytics."

CloudView 360's unique combination of semantic data processing and mash-up-style information presentation provides large user communities with quick understanding of essential business information without having to work through tens or hundreds of applications or information sources. Relevant events, history, status, metrics, know-how and expertise are focused and combined to provide comprehensive insight. Information is mashed-up into dashboards and real-time executive summaries that include traditional charts and graphs, descriptive extracts, key facts, relationship graphs and Web-oriented representations such as word clouds.

Search-based applications built with CloudView 360 address needs for information and insight across enterprise functions that include research and development, manufacturing and logistics, regulatory compliance, sales and marketing, human resources and finance. Deployments of search-based applications now serve the communities of tens of thousands of users.

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About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.

Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in June 2010. Exalead has offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Milan and Frankfurt.