You know the document is there, but you can’t find it. And your search tool isn’t helping you. What you need is context and what Interse calls “information findability.” Founded in 2001 with headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, Interse is a specialized software company that has a new approach to enterprise search. It focuses on bringing productivity and speed to the enterprise search game. And targets industries such as consulting, legal, tax and auditing, life sciences and biotech, defense and high-tech, public sector, and investment banking. Interse’s iBox solution provides metadata modeling and classification, and contextual (metadata) search and navigation on top of SharePoint. The metadata model builder combines metadata modeling and classification in one function, and can be applied to any content, in any repository the iBox is connected to. With 80 percent of corporate data still residing in file systems, there’s a huge cost in time and resources for corporations to move all of this data to a central ECM system, just to apply metadata. Hence, the big benefit of Interse. The iBox solution is also great at taxonomy management, universal records management, and automatic tagging of content among many other capabilities—enabling more relevant searches for better decision making.
Interse’s iBox enhances the value of Microsoft’s product suite for Enterprise Search, and showcases the full value of SharePoint and MOSS 2007 technologies, and works across enterprise-wide repository systems and applications, including legacy.
According to Interse’s CEO Eyal Steinitz, “I think the big vision for us is about helping people reuse unstructured information regardless of format or location. When I came on board about four years ago, we decided to focus on where the information works, on the desktop using Office. We knew that was the core tool, and knew we needed to be there with Microsoft. And seeing the potential of SharePoint early on, we wanted to be positioned as an add-on or extension to the office system and SharePoint.”
The Microsoft Connection?
Interse started by building a strong relationship with Microsoft’s core search team in Europe and the U.S. during the early years of its partnership. Once it gained experienced, and proved itself to Microsoft (the company is now a Gold Certified Partner), Steinitz says it began working with Microsoft sales teams and winning customers in a number of Microsoft’s vertical market strongholds. One of its Interse’s customers, Purdue Pharma, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company known for its research in chronic pain management, needed a better way to manage clinical trial documentation. The joint solution included Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007 and the iBox metadata management and search solution. Says Anthony Sclafani, Assistant Director, Collaborative Business Solutions, Purdue Pharma, “The iBox and SharePoint Portal Server solution makes our drug development model—and our business—practical. How do you measure the return on investment of that?”
According to Steinitz, “We have a great relationship with Microsoft. As technology specialists have become more aware of this search space, and aware of the competitive landscape, they’ve seen the value we bring to customers buying Microsoft technology. Clearly, SharePoint is helping accelerate the need for iBox. Microsoft actually recommends it to customers—in fact we get 80 percent of our leads from the Microsoft ecosystem. We will work only with Microsoft Gold Certified Partners that have a significant experience in both search and SharePoint. They need to have about 50 to 80 MOSS or SharePoint installations as experience.”
Where are they now?
Interse has venture backing of more than $20 million from Nordic Ventures Partners and Northzone Venture, and operations across Europe and North America.
In 2007, the company won industry recognition from Legal Technology magazine for having ‘the most innovation solution in the legal industry in the UK.’
Interse now has a plug-in for leveraging MOSS’ free text search engine.
For more information, visit Interse online.
