White Paper Don t Build the Zoo: Discover Content in its Natural Habitat Written By: Chris McKinzie CEO & Co-Founder Enlyton Reinvents Search Technology for the Speed and Simplicity Enterprise Workers Expect A new approach to enterprise search keeps content where it is, indexes it, and makes it searchable in hours or days, not months. The information workers need to do their jobs is out there, resting in e-mails, idling in office documents, loitering on the Internet, and standing by in third-party sources. The process of making this information searchable has been a painful one to date, requiring taking each piece of content out of its natural habitat, tagging it, categorizing it into a taxonomy, and placing it in a central holding pen with other species. Basically, it requires building and maintaining a zoo. This ordeal is too time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to capture the millions upon millions of sources needed by 21st century knowledge workers. Worst of all, end users are not getting the results they need from the traditional search solutions built on these unwieldy processes. The time for liberation from conventional enterprise search processes and solutions is here. Technological advancements such as cloud computing and the ability to process larger amounts of data are converging to free companies from the shackles of search solutions that have not evolved in the last decade. A new approach to enterprise search keeps content where it is, indexes it, and makes it searchable in hours or days, not months. End users can search both internal and third-party content in real time, regardless of structure or location, and view it all in whatever interface they choose. This eliminates the need for aggregating data and putting artificial structure around it: Companies no longer need to build a zoo just to house and search content. The real emancipation is for businesses and knowledge workers even small teams who are freed to be more creative and productive with self-service search applications: Employees can quickly set up specific search queries of any sources without the need for expensive, long-term IT projects. This is the promise of search fulfilled with the ease of an app store. In addition, publishers and digital asset managers, among others, can contemplate new revenue sources from the ability to easily create complex searches and search applications.
Assume the pricing team in your organization wanted to become more responsive to market conditions. They have built an internal repository of information that the team collaborates on regularly, but they also need to constantly track and manage competitor Web sites, industry news, and blogs as well as social commentary. With Enlyton s platform interface, the pricing team can set up their own custom portal or topic page for consuming live content collections of organized information (from internal & external sources) that are always up to date without ever having to re-do a search again. Traditional enterprise search solutions are constrained by a lack of innovation. How Did We Get Here? The Current State of the Enterprise Search Landscape Traditional enterprise search solutions are constrained by a lack of innovation plus reliance on an increasingly outdated IT model of on-premise software and hardware plus ongoing services. IT organizations essentially have to build a zoo before they can install a legacy search technology (see sidebar). The process is time-consuming, costly, and onerous. Companies are required to aggregate all content that employees may need (typically limited to internal sources); replicate a content management system or set up a data warehouse; create complicated dataset organization (taxonomies, ontologies) and training sets; and pre-index the content. Other necessities include designing/developing the query interface as well as end-user applications, training the search technology, dataset & index maintenance, amongst many others. The reason for all this is that the typical approach to search involves putting the organization on top of the content: Manually applying some structure that seems practical, such as keywords or taxonomies. Search solutions based either on traditional keyword or latent semantic indexing are limited and have not had any true innovation in more than a decade. Innovation has been stalled because the main search vendors have been gobbled up by giant firms intent on driving hardware and services revenue. With such a big investment required, the only way an enterprise can achieve any real return-on-investment (ROI) is to deploy the search solution to a large user base. As a result, business users are left out in the cold. With data and sources multiplying at an unprecedented rate, IT usually does not have the resources to keep up using conventional search products. Small- to mid-size organizations cannot afford the resources required to deploy enterprise solutions. Small teams at larger organizations who need to move quickly cannot engage their IT organization for short-term projects. Existing IT efforts and search technologies do not provide a realistic ROI to support the development of a search-based application for only a handful of users. Organizations that expand via means such as acquiring a company, buying a new Web site property, and/or licensing third-party content are prevented from searching all this data in a fast, easy, and efficient manner. The cost of not being able to access these untapped resources is incalculable. Enlyton, Inc. 2013 www.enlyton.com 2
Breaking Free of Convention: Enterprise Search Evolves A new approach to enterprise search abandons the idea of aggregating and organizing content at all in favor of keeping the data where it lives and making it searchable right away: There is no need to build a zoo with the associated time, expense, & maintenance headaches just to collect, organize, and search content that is already housed elsewhere. How is this possible? One factor is cloud computing, which decouples enterprise applications from the underlying infrastructure, releasing IT organizations from much of the time and cost of managing it in-house. Organizations need a simple solution that allows access to discovery and curation of both internal data and external content from the Web Taking advantage of cloud computing and advancements in processing large datasets, Enlyton has created a new way to manage and more importantly leverage both internal and external digital assets. Using its patented mathematical semantic technology, Enlyton offers a modern-day enterprise search product that discovers content wherever it resides, giving IT and end users the ability to: Provide an inventory of searchable content in real-time without the need for integration Index internal and external datasets seamlessly without aggregation Filter and organize content exactly as needed for the end-user application required Eliminate hardware and software deployment and deliver a true cloud-based solution Avoid expensive and time-consuming IT projects that require ongoing training efforts as well as dataset and infrastructure maintenance Build specialized, highly targeted search-based applications within a custom interface Access and discover content seamlessly across multiple interfaces: web browser, mobile and offline Provide automated updates that serve the most relevant related content Make search results sharable with the ability to collaborate in real time. 3
The Future Is Now: Enlyton Reinvents Enterprise Search Enlyton removes the burdens of traditional technologies to make search simple and easy for both IT organizations and business workers. This new approach throws old assumptions out the window: With Enlyton, there is no huge IT project needed, no database, no tagging, no organizational structure, no training of the search technology. What Enlyton does offer is the first truly cloud-based technology for indexing, managing, and delivering both unstructured and structured data. This powerful solution leverages proprietary mathematical semantic technology that finds structure in the language itself. This natural language processing enables Enlyton to offer a powerful search-based app platform to inventory and organize diverse digital assets and create search applications to engage any audience. This powerful solution leverages mathematical semantic technology that finds structure in the language itself. As a result, end users can search content wherever it resides in real time. Enlyton s service takes any document, content or URL and uses the full (or highlighted) text as the search criteria to auto curate a collection of related content. It indexes all of an organization s content and makes it both manageable and discoverable via a Web interface. In addition, results can be configurable to include content from ANY external source. Just as importantly, Enlyton can quickly inventory content at scale and make it searchable in hours or days, not weeks or months. For example, if a company has a large amount of digital properties, Enlyton can take that content and cross-reference related documents regardless of the source. As a result, employees can turn any and every document in the organization s archive or designated outside sites into a digital collection or magazine of highly related content. Results can be presented in a variety of engaging ways, including a multitude of user interfaces (i.e. tabs, lists, widgets, etc.) as well as mobile and social platforms. Additionally, these collections are dynamic and can be updated daily as new content is published. Enlyton s templates make it easy to search, organize, discover, and visualize specific content that is relevant to an employee or team from both internal and public resources. Using the same platform, a company can create an internal portal equipped with custom topic pages for each specific need. Connected to these topic pages would be a live feed of appropriate news and contextually related content to their particular emphasis. Highly targeted search applications provide timely access to information, saving significant research time. As the first cloud-based enterprise search and content discovery company, Enlyton puts no burden on storage or processing infrastructure and requires little to no technical implementation from the organization. Using Enlyton means there is finally a cost-effective, flexible way to turn enterprise search into useful searchbased applications. The Enlyton solution is based on four pillars, making it easy to deploy and use: 4
When search is this easy, the possibilities are endless Freed from the time and cost demands of traditional enterprise search, IT can facilitate user-centric search applications that better serve the needs of the business. Inventory: Create a visual inventory of digital assets, regardless of storage location. Inventory internal and public content without the pain of aggregating it one place. Organize: Develop end-user organization models quickly without lots of IT. Design topic pages, create context-oriented file folders or define any structure that meets the end-user objectives for content consumption, research or organization. Search: The Enlyton search engine platform produces an enhanced solution for providing quick access to related content by utilizing mathematical semantics to return high-quality results with a clean, simple interface. No indexing, training, setting up ontologies and taxonomies or endless tagging. Apps: An intuitive approach to information discovery delivering a simplistic yet compelling user driven experience that gives the user full authority to choose what news & content to receive, when to receive it and how they want to view it across various platforms. End users can choose from Enlyton s template gallery or utilize Booklyt XML files to easily create a customized user interface. When search is this easy, the possibilities are endless. Enlyton empowers organizations to expand and exploit both internal corporate knowledge and external data sources for long-term competitive advantage. Freed from the time and cost demands of traditional enterprise search, IT can facilitate user-centric search applications that better serve the needs of the business. Businesses may find new revenue opportunities as well as facilitate lower costs, faster service, and a more productive and creative workforce. Why build a zoo when you can visit a world of content in its natural habitat and reap the benefits? Contact us: info@enlyton.com 855-ENLYTON 512-852-9011 5