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Vivisimo recently released version 5.5 of its Velocity search product, and -- while the company's motto has been "Search Done Right" -- with this new release they liken it to having enterprise search "grow up" and scale up to a whole new level.

I recently spoke with Vivisimo's CEO Raul Valdes-Perez and Chief Scientist Jerome Pesenti about the new product. The company has been around since 2000 when it was founded as a spin-off of work being done at Carnegie Mellon University. Its products are built entirely around the XML architecture offering speed and scalability.

Valdes-Perez likened this new release to the metaphor of enterprise search growing up. It offers:

Ability to speedily deploy across the enterprise

Painlessly maintain the search engine

Features that embrace the full complexity of the enterprise

Ability to work across heterogeneous repositories and provide a great user experience

Based on my conversations and demos I would say there are two key differentiators that make Velocity unique. The first is its user interface based on the concept of clustering. The second is the ability to configure your entire search platform through the web browser using point and click administration for complex tasks across many servers.

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The user interface is clean, crisp, and maximizes screen real-estate to provide users with a categorical approach to search results. The screen is intuitive and takes the best of the consumer search world and makes it work within the enterprise environment without wasted space where the consumer ads used to be.

The foundation for this is the company's clustering engine. In simple terms, the clustering engine puts search results in context for the user. If you want to see what this looks like in practice, check out Clusty, which is Vivisimo's consumer search presence that uses the same code base as Velocity. With results organized by category and theme, it makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for. Inside the organization I can see where this would be immensely helpful allowing for a breakdown between key categories like Human Resources, Standard Operating Procedures, etc. You can also take Velocity's trademark user experience for a ride over at USA.gov, which allows you to search a wide range of government information.

The second key feature is Velocity's ability to scale across multiple servers and applications. In the new 5.5 release you can now replicate your document index across multiple servers for availability, load balancing, and increased performance. There is no hard limit to the number of documents that can be indexed on a single server (short of what the server can handle and respond to within acceptable timeframe). So as you spread your index out across servers the number of documents it can handle is well into the hundreds of millions. Since it indexes documents as-is you don't need to spend a ton of time creating taxonomies and meta-data. It comes pre-built with connectors for databases, Microsoft SharePoint Portals, and EMC Documentum Databases.

Administration of the tool is done through the web browser using point and click to configure the federated search, including all the load balancing and performance tweaks mentioned above.

Behind the scenes, Velocity relies on XML and XSL standards to perform all its data transformations and presentation required from the search workflow. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris (version 8 and older). While it can be fully administered from within the browser interface, there is an API available using the XML standard which can be called directly from C, C++, COM Object, Java, or Perl if you care to extend its functionality. Velocity supports single sign-on which allows you to extend your existing document security to your search results.

To learn more visit the Vivisimo web site, or contact them at 1-866-254-8484.

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