Exalead Fuels Ecosystem for Search-Based Applications With New North American Partner Program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/30/09 -- Exalead, a global provider of search-based business application (SBA) technology, today introduced its North American Partner Program, designed to foster an ecosystem of business applications built on Exalead's award-winning CloudView information access platform. Resellers, systems integrators (SIs), implementation partners and specialty services firms can take advantage of CloudView to differentiate their offerings with purpose-built search-based applications that deliver better value to their customers.

Today, more than 200 companies run CloudView search-based applications used by over 100 million unique users per month. With this new program, Exalead is extending the power of its search platform to more users in more specialized scenarios where a general purpose Web search engine isn't enough.

"Over the last few years, Exalead's customers have demonstrated just how powerful search technology can be in reinventing business requirements such as knowledge management, business intelligence, and data integration," said Ranjeet Vidwans, Vice President of Business Development for Exalead. "Search-based applications enable immediate action and decision-making as opposed to merely providing more content for research. As such, we believe the demand for search-based applications will only increase as companies seek innovative ways to better solve specific business needs. By creating this ecosystem of valued partners, we will be able to meet these market demands and ultimately drive customer satisfaction."

Building a partner portfolio that is diverse enough to satisfy the broad needs of the market is a crucial goal of the program. As a partner, qualifying firms have access to benefits such as partner-specific training, technical and business resources, early access to new product releases and assistance in developing their own information access practices built around Exalead technology. In addition, the program offers a wide range of business arrangements from skills certification and services subcontracting to referral and reseller agreements. This degree of flexibility ensures that Exalead's prospective clients can work with the provider of their choice, while still availing themselves of the company's market-leading search-based application technology.

"We are working with Exalead on behalf of a number of clients at their request," said Miles Kehoe, president of New Idea Engineering, a firm specializing in the business and technology of enterprise search. "Our customers all require quick access to information for business decisions, but each also has a unique, varied and complex set of search needs. Our partnership with Exalead allows us to offer a flexible, scalable search tool that can be easily tailored to meet the specific demands of our clients."

Marc Pageau, CEO of Norconex, an Ottawa-based search services consultancy, further added: "Exalead's unique approach to search via customizable search-based applications offers clear value to our customers, but what really makes Exalead stand out is how easy it is to work with them. Their responsiveness to us as a partner and the clients ensures that we will enjoy a fruitful relationship going forward."

In many cases, clients need very specific types of assistance that requires partners with specialized and deep skill-sets in areas such as taxonomy design, UI customization, and performance optimization. KAPS Group is one such partner that Exalead has brought on board. CEO and chief knowledge architect Tom Reamy commented: "Clients frequently turn to us to help them develop new content organization capabilities including taxonomies, faceted metadata and auto-categorization implementations for their unique needs. Exalead provides us with the framework to plug in whatever taxonomy we feel best suits the needs of the customer, whether it be completely custom or implemented through a third-party taxonomy product."

Exalead's North American Partner Program is currently open to qualified resellers, SIs, implementation partners, and specialty services firms. For more information, please visit http://www.exalead.com/software/partners/. To learn more about search-based applications, visit http://bit.ly/rLUpx to hear Exalead partners and customers discuss the business benefits of building and utilizing tailor-made applications on CloudView.

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead® is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PriceWaterhouseCooper, Michelin, and American Greetings, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform, Exalead CloudView(TM) that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative search-based business applications.

Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in San Francisco, Paris, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt. Readers who wish to gain more information about Exalead can visit www.Exalead.com or contact (415) 230 3800.