Newsletters

Select newsletters below and click the button to sign up!

Become a Marketplace Partner

Partner With Us

Internet.com / Blogs

All Internet.com / Blogs

News & Trends

Technology

Internetnews Bloggers

Monthly Archives

Search The Blog

Software's Sublimation by Alex Goldman (bio )

Data's diffusion throughout business and into the cloud

« FastScale manages cloud and physical servers | Alex Goldman Blog | Chinese Web users face wave of phishing and spam »

BA-Insight's Longitude boosts SharePoint search

By Alex Goldman on June 8, 2009 7:36 AM

When enterprise databases scale to terabytes and individual documents grow to megabytes, the basic Google-like search result page is no longer enough. Enter BA-Insight, based in the U.S. with software development in Russia and India, whose Longitude product improves Microsoft's SharePoint by adding several key features.

"We deliver an extended rich metadata profile with a set of actionables that allow users to drill down into each item quicker than normal and assess whether it is of value to them," Guy Mounier, BA-Insight CTO told InternetNews.com.

"The second step is to quickly act on information. The actions we provide allow you to immediately consume information in the context of your the enterprise information infrastructure, delivering information better and faster and enhancing worker productivity."

Longitude does all of this with two components: connectors and search. The connectors enable the product to import information from key enterprise software products. Currently supported software includes Oracle, SAP, Documentum, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and more. BA-Insight is working to add Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM .

Search

For search, the company delivers some capabilities that are familiar to Web users and some capabilities that most readers will not have seen before. For every search result (click on screen shot for full image), the company delivers a tag cloud, faceted search (so that users can screen results by content type or other variables), and displays document popularity.

It even shows the top ten pages within each document in the result listing.

It shows the document type by displaying the appropriate software icon (often one of Microsoft's icons).

When users click on an item, they stay within Longitude. It delivers a single page rather than an entire document so that users can download only a few KB instead of the entire 8 MB document and make faster decisions about whether that item is what they were looking for.

Users can cut and paste from that one page, navigate to another, or download the whole document.

Since the user stays within Longitude after clicking on a search result, Longitude's user behavior statistics are much better than those of other search engines because other engines register as valuable those items that are useless but which are clicked on.

Mounier said his company's search beats the competition. "Many of our competitors do a 1.0 preview. It's an image. You cannot do anything with it. You cannot highlight within it or copy and paste. We use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a new way of presenting and laying out graphical information."

The user can output search results to an RSS feed if, for example, they look for the same data once each month or week.

Mounier said that the system delivers results by using automated meta tagging. "We re-use existing entities in the enterprise software environment, such as your list of vendors from SAP, automatically without human intervention," he said. "I've not seen anybody else us this like us out of the box."

Riding the Microsoft channel

Companies understand the value of search and they trust Microsoft, Mounier said. "SharePoint is the fastest selling server product in Microsoft's history, delivering revenue of over a billion dollars and over 30 percent annual growth," he said.

"For us, piggybacking on SharePoint is a way of shortening the sales cycle because we know that SharePoint customers are already interested in information access and the value we provide is that we can boost the productivity of the SharePoint user," he added. "We have a high and immediate conversion rate."

Mounier said that the company is one of 300 Microsoft Tier 1 partners worldwide. "You get a partner account manager who follows you and introduces you to accounts," he said.

He added that the company is part of Microsoft's Google Compete Team.

BA-Insight nevertheless plans to move beyond SharePoint. "Our technology is applicable to the Google Search Appliance, Oracle Portal, and IBM WebSphere," he said. "We can hook on . . . to other enterprise search platforms. We need to decide which has a broad audience."

Mounier said that BA-Insight's main competition is system integrators, a sentiment echoed recently by Atul Saini, CEO and founder of SOA-provider Fiorano .

"Consultants hate us because of our one-click setup," he said.

He added that cloud integrators like BlueWolf are potential future partners. "Those integrators that focus on business process re-engineering and let technology and software companies support that -- those type of integrators will be natural reseller partners for us," he said.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Share