Information at your fingertips

An Executive Interview with Adeptic

All too often organizations struggle to manage siloed and disjoined data. Jimmy Afshar explains how enterprise search solutions provide staff with a holistic overview of business-critical information.

CXO. Why is up to date information search technology so vital for businesses today?
Jimmy Afshar. The average amount of data produced is increasing rapidly. Data may reside anywhere from employee workstation’s local disks to shared file servers, email servers, database servers, archives, and Internet or intranet web sites. As the data volume grows the need for a coherent enterprise search solution becomes more evident. Real value is delivered only if the implemented search solution returns fast, reliable, complete and up to date information without introducing considerable administrative overhead or large support and maintenance fees.

CXO. What are the major issues with enterprise search today?
JA. Most companies lack a cohesive enterprise search strategy, resulting in simple suboptimal solutions or complex and fragmented solutions with overlapping functionality. It is not uncommon for business-critical applications to use simple search tools with poor performance or utilise a mix of different technologies either in-house or expensive third party products that significantly increase the cost of support and maintenance.

A typical scenario is to mimic Internet search engines by using a crawler to index structured data. Using a crawler to index internal structured data adds complexity and inefficiency to local networks. Besides, in most cases the solution would not include a full implementation of company’s enterprise search rules.

Another typical scenario is to use traditional database technology to index and search data residing in enterprise databases. Database server operations include major overhead and are not optimised for pure search operations. This becomes more evident in search critical applications where performance is crucial. In addition, routing every search request to enterprise databases will put extra load on already overburdened servers.

CXO. What are the main benefits of the Adeptic Enterprise Search Suite (AESS)?
JA. Our customers say, ‘We’ve got what we expected, an ultra fast free-text search engine, which gives the right answers to our queries’. The integration and configuration is made easy so there is no need for costly projects involving a troop of consultants trying to trim, tune or integrate an already expensive product even more costly and risky. Besides, it is really easy for our client’s technical resources to add new data sources, tune or configure AESS if desired. We also offer a rapid proof of concept with minimal resources. We can be really concrete i.e. we can show the power of AESS by presenting a proof of concept based on real data. It is then easy to compare AESS with existing or competing solutions.

CXO. How is the Adeptic Enterprise Search Suite designed to meet the needs of corporate intranet, Internet or eBusiness search solutions?
JA. AESS offers a robust platform guaranteeing optimum performance while maintaining easy integration and administration. AESS contains an ultra speed indexing engine, the fastest on the market giving today’s available software and hardware technologies.

AESS employs a state-of-the-art fuzzy search algorithm with remarkable fault tolerance and search speed. The fault tolerance sensitivity can be adjusted to desired level depending on the application using the search function. AESS is an enterprise search solution able to index different types of data residing in different data sources. AESS supports multi channel solutions where search results, authorisation and security levels and company search rules might differ between different channels.

CXO. How will Adeptic's search technology be developed in the future?
JA. Adeptic has recently developed advanced statistical modules to predict and suggest search results based on other users behaviors and search patterns. AESS can be configured to automatically sort down relevant items that are statistically rarely chosen. The ranking of items in a search result becomes simply dynamic and will change depending on search statistics, user behaviour and predefined ranking and sorting priorities. Combined together with a powerful fuzzy search algorithm and predefined search rules an attractive search tools is created. Our development activities will include working together with data mining and business intelligence solution providers requiring high performance and customizable search solutions to deliver new AESS modules in near future.

Jimmy Afshar is the CEO of Adeptic Technologies, the leading enterprise search solution provider in Scandinavia. Afshar has advised various organisations on a broad range of topics within information search, management and information technology solutions. He is responsible for the development of key strategies in enterprise search on international market. Please contact him at +46 735 33 8279 or his email address is jimmy.afshar@adeptic.net.