Sinequa Enterprise Search Solutions
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Sinequa developed from 1985 till 2005 a linguistic and semantic search technology. (Prior to the bubble burst of 2000, it was called Cora) Since 2005, Sinequa has been shaping a Busines Search solution dedicated to enterprise search and search based applications.
Sinequa sells its software under licenses and includes among its customers blue chips such as Credit Agricole, Siemens, Saint-Gobain and the French Ministry of Defense.
Today, I’ll be interviewing Jean Ferre of Sinequa in order to learn more about their Enterprise Search products.
I’ve noticed that unstructured business data is growing very quickly. How much of a problem is this, and how do you help?
We equally address structured and unstructured content.
However, about unstructured information, it is the pain point of all highly digitalized companies that must deal with challenges ranging from documents attached to business processes to informal content lying in internal social networks.
We help because we not only provide seamless integration with all content sources (including out of the box multidomain security management), but also because our semantic technology enables Sinequa Context Engine to understand the context of any piece of information, this brings a lot of value and of relevance to information access functionalities.
Do you have any success stories that you can share to give some context?
If you follow this link (http://bit.ly/jeanferre) you can read one of our customer cases. This customer has 8 billions records set per year to index and 600 millions emails and over 2 billions documents…
What should businesses look for in a business search solution?
Definitely, Business Search is not to address nice to have needs like Intranet search.
Business Search makes sense when a category of business workers are at pain everyday in their work because access to relevant data or information is too complex and lacks context, therefore it takes too much time or costs too much money (which puts the business at risk) or it is too inaccurate (which also puts the business at risk).
With Credit Agricole, they were able to empower their employees when it comes to access customer information.
Another customer of ours is Mercer Consulting solutions, who were able to information among tens of millions of documents sitting in fileshares.
Or to give a last example… Some organizations use Sinequa to empower investigation agents.
What makes Sinequa different from other business search solutions on the market?
The embedded capacity to truly understand context, because of the unique combination of rich connectivity and of advanced text-mining and semantic analysis functionalities;
This enables Sinequa Search Bus (the core layer of Sinequa Context Engine) to import all the context from all the contents. Then a highly scalable GRID based architecture absorbs a range of volumes.
Another nice feature is the fact that a well packaged interface and/or accessible APIs enable quick deployment and/or development of business relevant interfaces (Search Based Application that can match the context of a business user and of its business process)
What is the difference between Social Search, Vertical Search, Enterprise Search and Line of Business Search?`
Social Search can mean two things :
- Search more for people than for documents (we do that a lot combining indexation of directories and all people related contents such as social networks), that can lead to expertise location and/or integration with IM tools and collaborative tools. In that case the purpose is to facilitate collaboration. One could say it empowers Collective Intelligence.
- Search that allows tagging and collaboration around documents and answers. “Your own appreciation of content, your comments and your tags can give insights, can help some other members of your company. `Sinequa actually provides both types of social search.
Vertical search is search based application delivered to specifically help a given vertical gain in productivity and efficiency.
Actually some search based application are more vertical (focused on a given vertical) while other are more horizontal (focus on a given functionality that can happen to be found in any type of vertical industry).
In all cases, it’s just a matter of understanding the business issues behind the vertical needs and to implement them in a Search Based application, built on top of Sinequa Business Search Solution.
Enterprise Search to me is just general search across all enterprise content. The main value is to provide one stop shopping to access any content across the company.
By definition, it lacks business customization and integration, therefore it is a great tool to find something that you miss, but unlikely your everyday working tool.
Line of Business search is probably what I previously referred to as horizontal search.
For more information on Sinequa, please visit http://sinequa.com.
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