SearchBlox Software, an enterprise search, sentiment analysis and text analytics solution provider, recently announced its foray into India. The company which aims to bring replacement for Google Search Appliance (GSA), sees huge business prospects in the Indian enterprise segment. In a bid to expand the customer base in India, SearchBlox is heavily focusing on its go to market and channel play.
In a candid interaction with CXO Today, Timo Selvaraj, Co–Founder & VP Product Management at SearchBlox, highlights company’s channel strategy in India and also highlights the trends in the analytics business which is still largely unexplored in the country.
SearchBlox recently announced foray into Indian enterprise segment. What business potentials do you see in the Indian market?
As Indian companies are increasingly becoming global in nature, they are quickly getting engulfed with more and more unstructured data. These organizations sitting on such huge unstructured data have to be managed to get a better insight of their industry and the trends. There is, hence, a strong case for a solution that can ease the way manufacturing, retail, defense, financial, government and other industries manage their data. SearchBlox provides the solution to access, discover and analyze such huge data, both structured and unstructured, for information or data access, management and governance & compliance. We strongly feel that text analytics is an underutilized business strategy that can deliver unique advantage to organizations.
SearchBlox aims to bring a replacement for Google Search Appliance (GSA)? What is your plan of action to migrate existing customers of GSA on SearchBlox?
It is already in news that the support for the Google Search Appliance by Google will be discontinued in 2018. SearchBlox is the only solution in the market that offers a direct replacement for GSA at a lowest TCO. Moreover, we have a very mature migration process in place for GSA to SearchBlox transition. We have already helped 50 customers migrate from GSA to SearchBlox and are planning with many others to do the same. SearchBlox also offers a 30 day risk free option to try out the platform, so customers are fully satisfied with the product before making a choice.
What trends do you see in the Text Analytics space in India? How it is revamping Big Data Analytics?
Though text analytics is an emerging area of analysis, it is left underutilized in terms of a strategy within organizations. It involves dealing with large volumes of unstructured data coming from social, web, E-mail and document repositories. So far, Big Data has focused mainly on structured data, and dealing with unstructured is challenging due to the analysis required. Adoptions of speech analytics and speech-to-text transcription in contact centers are also trending these days. Marketers, publishers, and research and insights professionals are looking for such technologies to deliver effective results. Speech analytics is expected to serve as an enabler for high-accuracy conversational interfaces.
What potentials do you see in the Real-time Sentiment Analytics and Text Analytics? How can enterprise embrace these technologies?
Sentiment Analysis enables the organization to determine the opinion and feedback of the people. Text Analytics can enhance customer service levels as well as help in innovation for finding new ideas and products. Retail, government, media, legal and financial sectors can be early adopters of this technology as it solves several day to day challenges for them including reducing cost and time. Also, analytics can be used by the government campaigns’ IT cells to analyze and get real-time updates during elections or any other activities. They can protect better and serve the country by refining and analyzing people feedbacks regarding new budget programs, fraud detection can increase tax revenues, anti-money laundering in legal sector, etc.
What are the key technologies which will drive the Analytics business for vendors like SearchBlox?
Natural language processing (NLP) is gaining momentum with the increasing volume of text information and the cheaper cost of infrastructure to process big data for insights on employees, customers and users. Technology creators are experimenting with unstructured text like customer feedback, reviews, ratings, likes and comments in increasing number of organizations with the goal to automate the process of finding themes and extracting concepts for actionable insights. Massive data processing pipelines for text analysis and visualization tools for presentation of the business insights of the processed data are some of the evolving areas which have made analytics a new panorama for making better business. SearchBlox can be that shop single platform for companies looking for such advanced business analytics solutions.
While expanding business in India, how will you ensure unique value proposition to your customers?
Our USP globally has always been to add value to the existing data and provide insights on an ongoing basis. We have been empowering companies with faceted search and real-time analytics along with multi-lingual support. For the Indian market, we have added a support for 7 Indian languages as well as tailored solutions for the local markets. We are very competitive globally and will do so in the Indian market as well. We also offer our prospective Indian customers a full featured 30 day trial of the product for building a POC before they make any decisions about our product. And I am excited to tell you, most customers who did the POC ended up with the full SearchBlox solution.
What are your channel expansion plans in India?
India is one of the top emerging markets for businesses and technologies, and quite obviously we too are keen to expand our network of channel partners here. The channel partners are the ones with the closest ties with their customers and we intend to combine their strength with our technology prowess to deliver the best offer to the end customers. As we work primarily through them for implementation of our products, we conduct attractive Partner Program globally and are looking forward for the same in India.