About Sinequa

Sinequa is an innovative leading global provider of enterprise search solutions. With its strategic “Connect to Knowledge™” approach, Sinequa has packaged a knowledge access solution that goes one step beyond traditional information access.

Sinequa is a fast-growing software vendor founded in 2000. With roots in French university research in linguistics and semantics Sinequa has become one of the Top 100 companies that matter in Knowledge Management (KM World, 2008). This recognition reflects Sinequa’s ongoing commitment to product development (200 man years to date) and rapid global growth in customer numbers and profitability. Most of all, Sinequa's status in the enterprise search marketplace is built on a compelling value proposition: the quality of the results delivered to users, the reduction in implementation complexity, and the affordable total cost of ownership.

Sinequa's customers operate in many countries and industries and include Bouygues Construction, Total, MBDA, EADS, Seagram, Le Monde, Capita and Orange. These companies are leaders in their fields and are demanding customers when it comes to enterprise search.

Why is enterprise search critical for business?

Being able to find information quickly and accurately is what has driven the explosion in Internet usage in recent years. It's impossible to imagine an online world without it. Internet tools have routinely led the development of equivalent applications within business: consider the evolution of blogs and collaborative working. As people see their online lives transformed by new capabilities, so staff expectations, of what should be possible at work, grow.

The demand for information is also growing at unprecedented rates, while knowledge and expertise, locked in documents of all kinds, lie nearly dormant on network servers around every organisation. So a tipping point has been reached, a moment when locating and leveraging the information in your business is no longer optional. The time for enterprise search is here.

That's the theory …

The arguments are compelling, but does this reflect what is going on in the real world? Sinequa has used enterprise search to address many practical business problems:

• Accelerating the development of skills and the transfer and retention of knowledge in situations such as massive retirements, M&A, and international development
• Leveraging intellectual property and knowledge to accelerate innovation
• Writing high impact proposals that mitigate risk
• Ensuring compliance with regulation in areas such as proof of knowledge and customer care
• Responding quickly and accurately to complex customer queries
• Enforcing consistent use of internal policies and best practices
• Resolving complex litigation issues

The issues facing organisations in all industries are very real. "All I want to do is find the right person" is a plea heard around organisations every day. How many of your employees are saying "we must have done this before, the information must be in here somewhere"? There is research to back up what might otherwise just be hearsay:

Accenture surveyed 1500 managers in US and UK companies in late 2006:

• “Managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong.”
• “Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them.”

(http://www.accenture.com/countries/UK Press release 4 Jan 2007)

Capgemini surveyed 150 managers in large UK organisations in late 2007:

• 63% of respondents made business-critical decisions five times or more a week without the right information;
• Executives felt that there was a potential to increase business performance by 29% with more effective exploitation of information;
• In the UK that would be worth $140 billion a year.

(http://www.uk.capgemini.com/news/pr/pr1605)

With so much at stake and a groundswell of need for solutions, it would be easy to believe that many businesses have come up with effective answers. The evidence doesn't support this:

The NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Trends 2008 survey of 170 major organisations revealed that:

• 50% of respondents were not satisfied with their search implementation;
• In organisations with more than 50,000 employees, 75% had no more than 1 person responsible for search.

(http://netjmc.com/survey/index.html)

A Louwy survey in 2008 of 200 City workers (including Canary Wharf) highlighted that:

• 88% of companies invested in intranets;
• 8% had dedicated enterprise search;
• 77% of users thought their company would benefit from better search.

(http://www.sinequa.com/news,information-graveyards-have-capital-s-firms-spooked-primitive-corporate-information-search-tools-shamed-by-google-generation-says-sinequa,56.html)

Easier said than done?

Getting enterprise search right is proving to be more difficult than many companies expected. To understand why this is the case we need to look more closely at the primary challenge facing the successful enterprise search implementation. All search is different, whether for general information on the web, within an individual web site, or for e-commerce. Enterprise search is a distinct search discipline too: it is also the most complex.

• It is a fact of business life that enterprise information is incomplete, exists in many different forms (MS Office, PDF, HTML etc.), and in many different applications and locations (Sharepoint, Outlook, SAP to name but a few). There is a temptation to tackle this environment issue first: getting all the data together, tidying it up and then putting in place a search capability. Whatever the apparent attractions, this approach is too costly, too time consuming, and the business will lose interest very quickly.

• How much of your content is prepared and stored to make location and retrieval easier later? Remember that websites are built to be searched. Without the focus on complete metadata and linking that makes online search more effective, corporate data can be particularly difficult to find accurately. Security makes this even harder: owners of web-based information try hard to have their pages found by everybody; owners of corporate data are generally trying to restrict access to the right people only.

• People use search in business differently. They tend to need the answer rather than any answer. They also want to find the people associated with a search topic as well as the content. Many users want to answer the question “Who has done this before or knows about this?”

For search to work in the enterprise it has to work harder, shielding this complexity from the user while offering a value-for-money solution. This is what Sinequa has done.

The Sinequa enterprise search solution

Rather than try to apply existing search tools to the specific problems of enterprise search, Sinequa has analysed and understood the issues and developed a solution that has been built and tuned for enterprise search. Sinequa’s patented search engine uses a combination of four search disciplines that together work harder on content:

• Full text/lexical search
• Structured search, making use of metadata
• Linguistic search, understanding how the language works
• Semantic search, extracting the meaning of the content

Automatically identifying entities within content, such as people, places and companies, creates additional value in search results. The Sinequa search engine extracts common entities and will also highlight custom entities, such as products and project names that are specific to a business. An entity analysis is presented back to the user alongside the results of each search, allowing further refinement of the request and improved navigation of the results. Uniquely, Sinequa will automatically identify and extract related concepts to those being searched, broadening the reach of the initial request.

This powerful combination of search tools delivers industry standard results out of the box; there is no need for the complex tuning and maintenance that undermines so many implementation timescales and business cases.

Sinequa's connectivity is also a significant advantage. Sinequa has 35 industry standard connectors to data sources that include Sharepoint, Opentext, Documentum, eRoom, Lotus Notes; this list is continually growing. Connectors can be installed and working in a matter of hours, providing the flexibility to add new data sources quickly as requirements change and your business grows. All connectors are non-intrusive, so there is no need to change, adapt or move the data. Bespoke connectors to legacy applications can be developed within 2-3 weeks.

With Sinequa there is no need to set up or maintain search-specific security profiles. Sinequa has an in-built security model integrated with Active Directory, LDAP and application level security.

Sinequa offers a solution architecture that is scalable to your current and future business needs. The reduction in complexity, affordable total cost of ownership, and modern and powerful search experience make Sinequa a viable answer to vast range of business problems. The time for enterprise search is here: Sinequa is leading the way. Use Sinequa, and “Connect to Knowledge™”.