Exalead Takes OEM Approach to Enterprise Search to Compete with Google, Microsoft

Exalead is now reselling its enterprise search platform in an OEM capacity.

The company on the 27th January will unveil CloudView OEM Edition 5.0, the latest version of its platform for helping businesses search and organise structured and unstructured information.

Enterprise search and information management are unheralded but necessary functions for businesses looking to corral copious amounts of data.

Social networks, media e-commerce sites, financial services companies and government agencies use such technology to help control the information overload, creating a lucrative opportunity for vendors such as Microsoft’s Fast, Google, Vivisimo and Exalead.

Exalead now has a new delivery mechanism. It has historically sold its CloudView platform directly to vendors to install and run in their data centres. The company still does so, but has decided CloudView has been battle-tested enough to let ISVs resell it to their customers, Eric Rogge, who heads product and marketing for Exalead, told eWEEK 32rd January.

CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 comprises a new product architecture fitted with faster search and information management performance. It also easily embeds in existing software platforms more easily because it conforms to service- and Web-oriented architectures, including .NET, Java, C# and Perl, Exalead said.

The platform exposes search, processing indexing, administrative functions and operations through standard APIs, which will help OEM customers integrate the platform with their infrastructure.

Rogge said he expects that vendors in sectors such as e-mail archiving, content management, PLM (product lifecycle management), storage, and other types of information management software will use Exalead to analyse and search data.

This includes HTML and other content from social networks and other Web 2.0 sites, e-mail, Microsoft office documents and other files scattered across corporate servers, relational data and even proprietary application data. Rogge said:

We’re finding that Web 2.0 technology like wikis, instant messaging, social networking and collaboration are creating a new class of data, kind of like e-mail in the sense that we want to keep track of conversations, but much more explosively. It’s these kind of applications that enterprises need to get a handle on so they can track applications.

To that end, CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 can support over 500TB of data per server cluster and more than 100 million documents on a single server. It can index up to 30 million database objects in 10 hours and 60GB of mail data in a single hour.

Rogge declined to quote a specific pricing scheme for the OEM product, saying only that it would be “flexible,” for each business model. OEM partners will pick pricing scheme according to seats, revenue, concurrency and usage, document count, and data size.