An addled goose who goes by the name of Steve Arnold recently interviewed our new CEO, Scott Coles, as part of ArnoldIT’s Search Wizards Speak series of interviews with enterprise search executives.  The interview covers a lot of ground, including  ISYS’s plans for search in 2009 and beyond.

What’s clear is ISYS is taking everything customers and partners have come to know and love about us over the last 20 years and going even deeper to address the real challenges in search and help customers further leverage their search investments.  Some of the ways we’re doing this is through complimentary executive briefings and application audits.

When industry consultants like Steve Arnold say that search is broken, it’s largely the result of poor education and a disconnect between the vendor and customer.  Our executive briefings and application audits are designed to get us aligned with your requirements immediately from the onset, thus ensuring successful implementation and end-user adoption.

We invite you to contact us to request a complimentary session with our leadership team.  We’ve always taken great pride in the personal service we deliver to our customer base, so we’re pleased to further extend this benefit.

We’ve been deliberately quiet as of late, thanks to a number of fun projects happening behind the scenes here at ISYS.  This week was just a taste of what’s to come in 2009.  In addition to announcing the appointment of our new CEO, Scott Coles, we also launched Version 9 of our ISYS:web information access and discovery solution for intranet search and site search.  The folks at EContent and Arnold IT covered it here and here.

Additionally, we rolled out our new website.  Collectively, these milestone moments kick off a new phase in our formidable history.  The year ahead for ISYS will be characterized by aggressive growth on all fronts, most importantly on the product development side of things.  We invite media, analysts and customers to contact us to learn more about our direction and what the roadmap looks like.

We’re now live at Defrag 2008, where folks are beginning to arrive for this two-day event in downtown Denver.  ISYS is exhibiting its Version 9 technology on the demo floor, and our very own Derek Murphy will be participating on a panel discussion on “Next-Level Discovery” on Tuesday at 11:15 a.m.

If you’re at the event, stop by and see our new demonstration of ISYS:web 9.  We’re using an index of 450,000+ Enron emails to demonstrate our parametric search and refinement, as well as our new “intelligence clouds.”  If you can’t make the event, contact us to request a one-on-one demonstration.

In the last two weeks, ISYS has had the privilege of landing on a handful analysts’ radars.  On Sept. 30, 2008, Gartner Inc. announced its 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, where ISYS is listed among many of the key players in the market.

Gilbane Group’s Lynda Moulton mentioned ISYS in a recent blog post, where she espoused the virtues of the nimble search players.  ISYS has long advocated an “iterative” approach to search, so we’re pleased to see the analyst community put some substance behind a philosophy we strongly encourage.

And finally, the venerable Steve Arnold was gracious enough to relay how he uses ISYS as one of his key tools for Google patent analysis.  Many folks know the fine work Steve has done tracking the GOOG, and it’s an honor to know ISYS plays a small role in his sought-after research.

Steve Arnold has a good post on the topic of SharePoint search. Over the years, Microsoft has been routinely criticized for its poor search, and much of the current commentary is directed at the confusion over Microsoft’s multiple search offerings. To be sure, that confusion will eventually fade as SharePoint’s penetration increases and the FAST technology that Microsoft purchased finds a home in the Microsoft search ecosystem. But that clarity isn’t arriving tomorrow, or any time in the near future.

More pressing for our customers is the complexity of setting up medium- to large-scale SharePoint search deployments. As Arnold points out, scale is a real concern with SharePoint’s built-in search system. ISYS opted to introduce its SharePoint Web Part a year ago as a result of customer demand for third-party search that would bring an added layer of sophistication. What users of ISYS SharePoint search get are added content analytics tools, such as entity detection, categorization, Boolean and proximity search, tag clouds and more, all out of the box.

These capabilities are key, but most important are the fundamental aspects of our tried-and-true indexing methodology, which Arnold cites as key to overcoming SharePoint Search’s scale issues. Read on.

If you’re planning on attending KMWorld in San Jose next week, be sure to stop by our booth (#219) and say hello. We’ll be exhibiting as part of the Enterprise Search Summit West, which is again co-located with the traditional KMWorld & Intranets show. The event takes place Sept. 23-25 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

It addition to showing off our new ISYS 9 technology, our very own Derek Murphy will also be participating in a panel discussion on multi-lingual search. Derek’s panel begin at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24. Hope to see you there!

We’re pleased to relay the news that our new ISYS 9 Suite was named to KMWorld’s Trend Setting Product list of 2008.  Obviously we’re biased on this one, but we believe our latest enterprise search offering gives our customers even greater “beyond search” power, unlocking the true potential of parametric search, navigation, results refinement and discovery.

As we add new ISYS 9 customers and learn more about their ISYS implementations, we’ll post those user stories on our website and blog. So be sure to check back often.

If you’re a regular reader of Lynda Moulton’s Enterprise Search blog for the Gilbane Group, you’re no doubt familiar with the recent research work she’s done on the industry and its players.  I’m sure Lynda has ample physical evidence to support how much work she and her team put into this (copious research notes, gallons of coffee and many sleepless nights, we’re sure), but the end product is quite comprehensive and informative.

In the report, you’ll find “practical guidance about product evaluation, selection, implementation, deployment and maintenance.”  A terrific “Getting Started” guide for anyone currently evaluating search, information access and discovery technologies.

Get your copy here, and then contact us with your questions.

No matter how loud our groans, technology marketing materials remain riddled with a variety of TLAs (three-letter acronyms). At the forefront of this acronym army is our friend ROI. It’s no surprise that ROI continues to be so popular. Let’s face it — it’s in our nature as consumers to understand what we stand to gain from our purchases.

One of the ways ISYS helps its customers determine the ROI for search and information access is via our ISYS SearchTrends analytics capability. SearchTrends delivers the standard reports, such as top search terms and the like. And while it’s always good to learn more about what your audiences are gravitating toward, the really interesting intelligence to be gleaned from SearchTrends is the information your customers aren’t finding.

Part Four in our white paper series takes a look at search analytics and the type of insight that reporting tools like SearchTrends deliver. Read “Measuring the Impact of Your Search Engine via Analytics” (PDF) to learn more about how to leverage search metrics on your website, intranet or portal.

One of the nice benefits of being part of the search game for 20 years is we’ve built up a solid base of longtime customers.  Many of them happen to be in the complementary fields of government, legal and law enforcement.  We routinely receive positive feedback from these groups, often unsolicited, so today we’d like to share with you a quick snippet that clearly illustrates the tangible value our customers get from their use of ISYS.

In a recent email exchange from our friends at the Michigan State Police, we learned about one of the ways they use ISYS for behind-the-firewall search.  The following is a quote from Sandy Chapman, who works in the Michigan Intelligence Operation Center:

“(ISYS) has come in handy many, many times. We will get calls from officers stating ‘I know you put this bulletin out maybe a month ago, but I can’t find it.’ In these instances we will get a few keywords from the officer as to the subject matter; enter into ISYS and 99% of the time we can find what they are looking for. ”

We obviously appreciate these comments, as they confirm we’re delivering on our mission – helping people find information fast.  Are our customers’ comments always so rosey?  Of course not.  But fortunately for us, the majority of feedback we receive is constructive in nature, and you’ll find that a good percentage of that input eventually works its way into our technology in the form of feature enhancements.  Our customers have made ISYS possible, and we appreciate the ongoing dialog we maintain with them.