IT Week: As managing director of enterprise search vendor Exalead, how do you ensure that your company stands out in what is in an increasingly competitive market?

Raymond Bentinck: We realised that enterprise search is currently too complex, expensive and hard to deploy. We took our inspiration from Oracle’s three-tier model [database, application server, client], which allows third parties to add applications in a way that is simpler to maintain and less costly to deploy. We see ourselves as doing to the search market what Oracle did to the database market. We also developed a whole new language, which means we can put the technology in very quickly, and a large proportion of our customers don’t need professional services from us. Most of the capabilities are out of the box, but the products can scale from the smallest to the largest implementations ­ an unlimited number of documents, queries or servers ­ and are all based on one platform.

What is the difference between web and enterprise search?

They are different models and the key to this difference is the authority of the content. On the web you form an implicit judgment of the content based on the URL or source. When dealing with enterprise search, you take the content at face value, but when you are searching with only one or two terms, as people are conditioned to do, it’s quite a tall order [returning relevant results]. We try to hold a dialogue with the user so that we present them with the results but then give them all the facets of that information too.

What are customers looking for in an enterprise search engine?

The amount of information is growing. Their internal content on servers and desktops is increasing and they have requirements beyond the firewall, to connect to third parties and to have a universal way of searching for it. They also want different views for different users or groups of users. Another driver is business intelligence (BI), as it doesn’t provide firms with the flexibility that search does.

How can search help firms maximise their BI investments?

BI never really lived up to its potential but search allows people to run the reports they need and put all the intelligence at the back end. The data warehouse is really just an index, but in our indexing environment it takes about a month to build, rather than 12.

How important is security to enterprise search?

It’s vital. Basically, you have various repositories ­ email archives, databases and so on ­ and access to them is secured at various group levels. You should never be presented with search results that a particular repository would normally not allow you to see, because you could infer meaning even from the search result.