Exalead, a global leader of information access software for business and the web, today announced the industry’s most flexible and scalable enterprise platform designed specifically to overcome the new challenges facing the evolving complex search requirements of enterprises and high traffic consumer facing web sites.

But first this message from Exalead:

“84% of enterprises are unhappy with their enterprise information access solutions,” said Paul Doscher, US CEO of Exalead. “Analysts see that while the vast majority of information management activities today are focused on structured data sources – the future of information management will be the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, unstructured information sources.” Leveraging its 170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month – Exalead has a clear view of the emerging issues that face enterprise customers. Enterprises are finding enormous competitive advantages when they can expand their view into various data sources in a way that brings context and understanding.

This requires an information access platform that can scale and allows businesses the flexibility in customizing the solution for specific industries. “GEFCO was seeking a solution that would enable it to go a step further in the optimization and management of the logistics process. Exalead has dramatically improved system efficiency across the board,” explains Guillaume Rabier, Manager of Studies and Projects for GEFCO, one of Europe’s top ten transport and logistics groups. “We now have faster access to information, reliable data and more operational reporting tools, allowing our sales department and global management teams to make better informed decisions. This in turn, enables us to offer a better service to customers and to differentiate ourselves from competitors.” “We selected Exalead because it fulfills our need to make navigation around our internal and external sites as easy and efficient as possible. Compared with other offerings in the search market, Exalead is a cost effective, feature-rich choice,” said Douglas Campbell, eSearch Project Manager, the Scottish Government.

“We have partnered with Exalead because as our site has grown internationally and particularly in geographies such as Asia – we needed a site search partner who could scale with us,” said Chander Sarna, senior vice president of engineering, ops and product of Friendster. “Exalead was the perfect fit because they enable us to scale our site while using less hardware.”

Introducing Exalead’s CloudView Product Line Exalead’s new CloudView family of products will be available starting in the 4th quarter of 2008. The family of products includes CloudView OEM and CloudView Search. The family of products will evolve from the Exalead one:enterprise line with a new architecture designed to better adapt to growing scaling requirements needed in today’s enterprise. The key challenge 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.

The future of information management will be the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, structured, semi-structured and unstructured information sources. Business users need a new generation of information access systems that bring relevance and context in addressing their information requirements. The industry-wide shift to housing data in a large number of silos, or “data clouds”, creates the demand for information access platforms with better connectivity, better interoperability and better scalability. As a result, IT executives will have the control they need but also the adaptability and flexibility to address the needs of the business. Exalead CloudView product line will offer:

• A next-generation, fully distributed architecture with centralized administration that improves Exalead’s already superior scalability and performance and at same time lowers TCO

• Business level tuning and management of the search experience creating ability for business executives to use search to make better decisions faster

• Ability to extend Business Intelligence applications to textual search so that business executives can monitor more information • Streamlined administration UI for greater use of search tools in the enterprise

• Full traceability within the product • Configurability: WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows

• Advanced configuration management system (with built-in version control)

• Improvements in the relevancy model

• Provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for 3rd party implementations

“We are building our new platform from the ground up so that it will also offer our partners, such as systems integrators and value added resellers, the ability to build out high end solutions to their customers” said François Bourdoncle, Exalead co-founder. “Our key objective is to allow developers to extend the reach of business applications to unstructured content.” Market Opportunities Exalead is going to focus on three main markets segments to fuel its expansion: online businesses, large enterprises, and OEM. In the online market, certain consumer facing web sites like online directories, classifieds, online publishers are seeing explosive growth and need a search vendor who can scale with them at the same time as lowering the cost of site search infrastructure such as hardware. These sites also require a search tool that can effectively mash up various data sources and present the information in a useful way to consumers.

“After performing an extensive three-month technical evaluation of the major enterprise search software vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to fulfill our demanding requirements,” said Peter Brooks-Johnson, product director of Rightmove, UK’s largest and fastest growing real estate web site. “Not only does Exalead require minimal hardware to work effectively, but Exalead has a strong, accessible support team and a culture that takes pride in its customer implementations.” In large enterprises, industry wide discontent with existing legacy enterprise search products leaves companies looking for smarter, more scalable search products. Enterprises are looking to new breed of search vendor who can search across much broader number of structured and unstructured data sources to hep them make better, faster decisions.

“Most enterprise search and content processing systems cannot handle billions of documents– Exalead does,” said Stephen Arnold, president of Arnold IT. “Exalead is one of a very small number of companies with a scalable technology and a robust search and content processing system that delivers millisecond response from commodity hardware. Consequently, Exalead’s search and content processing solutions give the company a technical advantage over vendors whose systems choke when thousands of users simultaneously want access to information.”

Finally, Exalead is expanding its OEM model as partners build applications on top of CloudView and help extend the search platform into various verticals. Exalead’s OEM offering is of particular interest to partners since it is at the core of Exalead’s CloudView family of products, and every feature of Exalead’s products is accessible to partners through an extensive Application Programming Interface (API). “Exalead’s ability to integrate data and content is of growing importance in today’s marketplace,” said Sue Feldman, research vice president, IDC’s Content Technologies Group. “For OEM partners, Exalead has developed a platform that allows for the development of many new vertically focused applications.”

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