Resources | BA Insight | AI-driven intelligent enterprise search software

70 | BA Insight CEO Massood Zarrabian Helps You Develop a Sound Business Case for Search

70 | BA Insight CEO Massood Zarrabian Helps You Develop a Sound Business Case for Search

Massood Zarrabian

69 | Innovation and Exploration in Enterprise Search at Orrick

69 | Innovation and Exploration in Enterprise Search at Orrick

Scott Mortenson

68 | Plumbing the Depths of Data with AI and Natural Language Processing

68 | Plumbing the Depths of Data with AI and Natural Language Processing

Sean Coleman

67 | Artificial Intelligence versus Human Intelligence: One Doesn’t Trump The Other

67 | Artificial Intelligence versus Human Intelligence: One Doesn’t Trump The Other

Jason McCullagh

66 | Esteve Pharmaceuticals Drives Integration and Collaboration Through BA Insight Connectors

66 | Esteve Pharmaceuticals Drives Integration and Collaboration Through BA Insight Connectors

Xavier Ayala

65 | Sean Coleman Brings Reflections on Microsoft Search from Ignite 2018

65 | Sean Coleman Brings Reflections on Microsoft Search from Ignite 2018

Sean Coleman

64 | Patrick Rochel Saves Time, Increases Agility by Going Paperless at Major Financial Services Firm

64 | Patrick Rochel Saves Time, Increases Agility by Going Paperless at Major Financial Services Firm

Patrick Rochel

63 | Importance of Integrating Intelligence into your Intranet

63 | Importance of Integrating Intelligence into your Intranet

Michal Pisarek

62 | Town Planning: Building Your New Digital Workplace

62 | Town Planning: Building Your New Digital Workplace

Sam Marshall

61 | Intelligent Search Technology Continues to Make Huge Strides

61 | Intelligent Search Technology Continues to Make Huge Strides

Jeff Fried and Sean Coleman

60 | At Korn Ferry, Great Search is Step One Toward Great Collaboration

60 | At Korn Ferry, Great Search is Step One Toward Great Collaboration

Bryan Ackermann

59 | Elastic vs. Solr – Is There One Right Choice?

59 | Elastic vs. Solr – Is There One Right Choice?

Kevin Watters

58 | Microsoft’s Development of More Personalized and Intelligent Search Solutions

58 | Microsoft’s Development of More Personalized and Intelligent Search Solutions

Mark Kashman

57 | Climbing Mountains of Data at Mars

57 | Climbing Mountains of Data at Mars

Mark Christianson

56 | Diving Head-First into Taxonomies with Helen Lippell

56 | Diving Head-First into Taxonomies with Helen Lippell

Helen Lippell

55 | Nationwide's Ted Williams Discusses Why Enterprise Search Fails and the Importance of Staffing It

55 | Nationwide’s Ted Williams Discusses Why Enterprise Search Fails and the Importance of Staffing It

Ted Williams

54 | Search Architect Bob Bachand Discusses Ways He Has Overcome Some Enterprise Search Challenges

54 | Search Architect Bob Bachand Discusses Ways He Has Overcome Some Enterprise Search Challenges

Bob Bachand

53 | Jeff Fried’s Top 10 Predictions for 2018

53 | Jeff Fried’s Top 10 Predictions for 2018

Jeff Fried

52 | The State of AI in Search

52 | The State of AI in Search

Jeff Fried

51 | Lessons on Implementing Information Management

51 | Lessons on Implementing Information Management

Robert Bogue and Jeff Fried

50 | What Goes into a Large Enterprise Search Project?

50 | What Goes into a Large Enterprise Search Project?

Sanjaya Paudel

49 | Expert Panel Shares Highlights and Opportunities in Microsoft’s Latest Announcements

49 | Expert Panel Shares Highlights and Opportunities in Microsoft’s Latest Announcements

Agnes Molnar, Mikael Svenson, Mikael Wendelius, and Jeff Fried

48 | Microsoft's Naomi Moneypenny on Intelligent Search and Discovery at Ignite 2017

48 | Microsoft’s Naomi Moneypenny on Intelligent Search and Discovery at Ignite 2017

Naomi Moneypenny and Jeff Fried

47 | An Open Source Perspective on Enterprise Search

47 | An Open Source Perspective on Enterprise Search

Charlie Hull and Jeff Fried

46 | Behind the Scenes of BA Insight’s SmartHub

46 | Behind the Scenes of BA Insight’s SmartHub

Jeff Fried

45 | Search and the State of GSA Replacements with MC+A's Michael Cizmar

45 | Search and the State of GSA Replacements with MC+A’s Michael Cizmar

Michael Cizmar and Jeff Fried

44 | Cognitive Computing and Search with CCC's Sue Feldman and Hadley Reynolds

44 | Cognitive Computing and Search with CCC’s Sue Feldman and Hadley Reynolds

Sue Feldman, Hadley Reynolds, and Jeff Fried

43 | A New Generation of Analytics with NGAGE CEO Paul Henry

43 | A New Generation of Analytics with NGAGE CEO Paul Henry

Paul Henry and Jeff Fried

42 | The State of Search with BA Insight CTO Jeff Fried

42 | The State of Search with BA Insight CTO Jeff Fried

Jeff Fried

41 | Lessons Learned from Legal Implementations with Rick Fafard

41 | Lessons Learned from Legal Implementations with Rick Fafard

Rick Fafard

40 | Introducing Search for Dynamics

40 | Introducing Search for Dynamics

Jeff Fried

39 | The Future of Findability — Guest Panel on Microsoft's Month of Announcements 2017

39 | The Future of Findability — Guest Panel on Microsoft’s Month of Announcements 2017

Jeff Fried with Mikael Svenson, Matthew McDermott, and Marc Anderson

38 | Large Pharmaceutical Marries the Power of Elasticsearch and SharePoint

38 | Large Pharmaceutical Marries the Power of Elasticsearch and SharePoint

Sean Coleman

37 | Global Pharmaceutical Organization Implements SharePoint 2016 as a Next Generation Search Platform

37 | Global Pharmaceutical Organization Implements SharePoint 2016 as a Next Generation Search Platform

Sean Coleman

36 | Global Pharmaceutical Organization Looks to Build Next Generation Search Platform

36 | Global Pharmaceutical Organization Looks to Build Next Generation Search Platform

Sean Coleman

35 | The Future of Findability in the Legal Industry

35 | The Future of Findability in the Legal Industry

Jeff Fried

34 | How a Life Sciences R&D Organization Used ‘Scientific Search’ to Improve Results

34 | How a Life Sciences R&D Organization Used ‘Scientific Search’ to Improve Results

Jeff Fried

33 | Christian Buckley on Hybrid SharePoint's Promising Future

33 | Christian Buckley on Hybrid SharePoint’s Promising Future

Christian Buckley

32 | A Successful Intranet Search Implementation in Life Sciences

32 | A Successful Intranet Search Implementation in Life Sciences

Jeff Fried

31 | Using Search to Extract Quick Value from M&A in Life Sciences

31 | Using Search to Extract Quick Value from M&A in Life Sciences

Jeff Fried

30 | Reducing Duplication in Life Sciences R&D

30 | Reducing Duplication in Life Sciences R&D

Jeff Fried

29 | Moving 150 Bananas per Second and Other Insights from Elastic{ON}17 with Elastic’s Shane Connelly

29 | Moving 150 Bananas per Second and Other Insights from Elastic{ON}17 with Elastic’s Shane Connelly

Shane Connelly and Jeff Fried

28 | The Hateful Eight: Portal Risks Every CIO Needs to Know

28 | The Hateful Eight: Portal Risks Every CIO Needs to Know

Sean Coleman

27 | The Evolution of Legal Technology with Jeff Bodem

27 | The Evolution of Legal Technology with Jeff Bodem

Jeff Bodem

26 | Findwise's Mikael Wendelius Shares Enterprise Search and Findability Report, Posts Promising Trends in Search Strategy Mikael Wendelius and Jeff Fried

26 | Findwise’s Mikael Wendelius Shares Enterprise Search and Findability Report, Posts Promising Trends in Search Strategy Mikael Wendelius and Jeff Fried

Mikael Wendelius and Jeff Fried

25 | Search in Life Sciences — Regulation, Transparency & Efficiency

25 | Search in Life Sciences — Regulation, Transparency & Efficiency

Jeff Fried

24 | Microsoft's Mark Kashman on Intelligent Search, Delve, and the Evolving Microsoft Graph

24 | Microsoft’s Mark Kashman on Intelligent Search, Delve, and the Evolving Microsoft Graph

Mark Kashman and Jeff Fried

23 | Expanding Connections: Bring Recommind to SharePoint with BA Insight

23 | Expanding Connections: Bring Recommind to SharePoint with BA Insight

Rick Fafard

22 | Faceted Search Comes to Mobile Today with New BA Insight Visual Refiners

22 | Faceted Search Comes to Mobile Today with New BA Insight Visual Refiners

Jeff Fried

21 | Building the Business Case for Search

21 | Building the Business Case for Search

Martin White and Jeff Fried

20 | 7 Steps to Building an Intranet that Your Employees will Love

20 | 7 Steps to Building an Intranet that Your Employees will Love

Harout Katerjian and Sean Coleman

19 | Microsoft, Facebook & Slack — The Fight for Teams in 2017

19 | Microsoft, Facebook & Slack — The Fight for Teams in 2017

Peter O’Kelly and Jeff Fried

18 | Top 10 Predictions for 2017

18 | Top 10 Predictions for 2017

Jeff Fried

17 | Connected Intranets, their Managers, and the Science Fiction Future of SharePoint Search

17 | Connected Intranets, their Managers, and the Science Fiction Future of SharePoint Search

Jeff Fried

16 | Unraveling Cloud Hybrid Gotchas with BA Insight's Director of Product Development

16 | Unraveling Cloud Hybrid Gotchas with BA Insight’s Director of Product Development

Tony Malandain

15 | The Insiders: Neil Hodgkinson & Mikael Svenson Highlight Ignite 2016

15 | The Insiders: Neil Hodgkinson & Mikael Svenson Highlight Ignite 2016

Jeff Fried

14 | Cortana Did All the Work at Microsoft Ignite 2016 — A Report from Jeff Fried

14 | Cortana Did All the Work at Microsoft Ignite 2016 — A Report from Jeff Fried

Jeff Fried

13 | Going Deep on Search Security

13 | Going Deep on Search Security

John Lenker

12 | Professional Services & Legal Industry Perspective — What’s Working & What’s Coming In Technology?

12 | Professional Services & Legal Industry Perspective — What’s Working & What’s Coming In Technology?

Richard Harbridge and Jeff Fried

11 | Is Your Intranet Intelligent?

11 | Is Your Intranet Intelligent?

Jeff Fried

10 | Collaboration: Failing or Flailing

10 | Collaboration: Failing or Flailing

Christian Buckley and Jeff Fried

09 | Diving into Deep Text

09 | Diving into Deep Text

Tom Reamy and Jeff Fried

08 | Discovering Hybrid SharePoint

08 | Discovering Hybrid SharePoint

Vlad Catrinescu and Jeff Fried

07 | SharePoint 2016 Search

07 | SharePoint 2016 Search

Agnes Molnar and Jeff Fried

06 | ElasticSearch and BA Insight

06 | ElasticSearch and BA Insight

Jeff Fried

05 | Cloud Hybrid Search with BA Insight

05 | Cloud Hybrid Search with BA Insight

Jeff Fried

04 | SEO Inside Your Firewall

04 | SEO Inside Your Firewall

Sean Coleman

03 | The 10 Hallmarks of a Digital Expert — Introducing Expertise Locator

03 | The 10 Hallmarks of a Digital Expert — Introducing Expertise Locator

Jeff Fried

02 | DLA Piper Amps Productivity Through Deeper Integration of BA Insight Software

02 | DLA Piper Amps Productivity Through Deeper Integration of BA Insight Software

Michael Tominna

01 | Multiplying the Benefits of SharePoint

01 | Multiplying the Benefits of SharePoint

Mike Gregory

Products

BA Insight for Azure Search

BA Insight for Elasticsearch

BA Insight for Microsoft 365

BA Insight for ServiceNow

Application Integration

Technology

AutoClassifier

Elasticsearch Connectors

SharePoint Connectors

SmartHub

Smart Previews

Services

Customer Support

Professional Services

Customers

Resources

Podcasts

Videos

Product Resources

Webinars

Case Studies

White Papers

About Us

Company Overview

Management

Team

News

Partners

Contact Us

Blog

Blog Posts

Blog Authors

Perspectives from our CEO,
Massood Zarrabian

Organizations have long been struggling with how to make knowledge assets available to employees, partners, and customers. Although there have been major technological advances in how this information is captured and made available over the past two decades, these have mostly been around a single business process. For example, when I joined Servicesoft, we were pioneering the idea of using search and classification engines to help transfer information to customers as part of the emerging eService market. At OutStart, we initiated the idea of objectifying learning and making the development of learning component-based so that it could be consumed via a “just-in-time” model. This meant that learners interacted only with learning objects that helped them increase their knowledge, and therefore their value, to the organization. In the last decade, another silo of information capture has emerged in the form of Social Business Software, making it easier than ever to capture nuggets of knowledge that can help others. The interesting dynamic in all of this is that there are large investments being made to capture information and knowledge assets, but very little of it is actually accessible by employees or customers.

In the ‘90s, multiple software vendors tried to address the issue of information access by providing software to implement portals, whether they were used for helpdesk integration, customer support, intranets, or R&D to help with the collaboration and reuse of IP. As the technology evolved and search engines and appliances became available, the portals were replaced with implementations of enterprise search. The problem with this approach is that it views the search engine as a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as opposed to viewing it as an enabling technology that helps organizations address a business issue. Failed enterprise search projects became the norm as companies tried, and continue trying, to resolve their information access challenges by implementing new search appliances while they still have underlying issues around integration with other systems, classification and tagging, and a sub-par user experience.

I joined BA Insight because I saw an immense opportunity to transform the way enterprise search is being implemented. I am sure you know that the amount of content that is being generated is growing exponentially across an increasing number of sources, and the inability to find the information assets our people need is costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity while leading to low morale and customer dissatisfaction.

When I evaluated the opportunity at BA Insight, I found the company to be uniquely positioned to provide a new approach to the unification of information that stops the pattern of enterprise search failures. We do this by transforming SharePoint, which has become ubiquitous across enterprises, into a unified information access platform that enables fast implementation of search-driven applications at a fraction of the cost of other options while de-risking search projects.

There are many notable and successful search-driven applications available on the Consumer Internet. Many are ‘killer apps’, and as a class they have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information. However, in comparison, corporate Intranets, customer support portals, helpdesk applications or knowledge management solutions don’t come close to being killer apps, nor do they provide a remarkable user experience.

I found it intriguing that BA Insight has the technology, people, and partners to help catapult enterprise search to the next level. We replace a people-intensive, SI-oriented approach to implementation with a technology-based approach that is lower cost, lower risk, easier to implement, and easier to upgrade. We do the heavy lifting to make our products work with different versions of SharePoint as well as various versions of other software applications that exist within a customer’s infrastructure. We automate how content is tagged to improve findability and also provide out of the box capabilities to improve the user experience with how information is found and accessed.

I believe that in order for a company to be wildly successful, it must demonstrate the following five important attributes:

First is customer-centricity. Customers put their trust in startups with a vision, and we must partner with them to make sure they succeed. I am so proud of all of the customers I have had the honor of serving, as well as their achievements, and I consider it the cornerstone of my past success and BA Insight’s future success.

Second is our team. Our people have the experience and the desire to help our customers implement and deploy incredibly powerful applications. We want to help our customers build killer apps, as opposed to search portals. This is a team of high energy, committed, customer-centric experts who have embraced the idea that search-driven applications could be a lot better and are working to change how they get implemented. I am fortunate enough to have become part of the BA Insight team and am so proud of everyone who works here. In a short period of time, we have made incredible progress on many fronts and I feel strongly that everyone’s loyalty and belief in the company will continue to provide an incredible depth for us and help our customers transform how they work with search technology.

Third is the technology. We have a broad set of capabilities that extend the value of existing SharePoint investments, so we eliminate the need to change the underlying infrastructure, saving a lot of time and money. We have over 50 out of the box connectors, a world class auto-tagging engine for content within and outside of SharePoint, visual refiners to let users drill down and find information quickly, an active workspace with content assembly, and document preview capabilities. We also provide a lot of flexibility in how our technology can be implemented. Our full platform, for example, is particularly well-suited for new projects. On the other hand, if search-driven applications have already been implemented within an organization, then components of our platform can be leveraged to augment the existing technology to improve results.

Fourth is to be financially responsible. Company success is about investment and return on that investment, and it needs to be measured in two fronts:

ROI, which is the pure quantitative and financial analysis, often measured as productivity gains.

My preferred approach is return on value (ROV), which is qualitative and focused on items such as customer loyalty, employee morale, better decision-making, and the ability to find information faster to increase customer responsiveness. Many of these things impact productivity and are therefore ROI, but they aren’t often measured and are therefore difficult to quantify. Isn’t the impact of finding the right knowledge to be able to do one’s job priceless? If we are smart about how we invest our time, money, and energy based on return on value, then we will naturally bring tremendous value to our customers and market and end up as a growing, profitable company that is resilient through the ups and downs of the economy and market.

And fifth is promoting a strong work/life balance. Work is important, but we cannot forget our families and shouldn’t compromise being with them due to office pressures. For a long period of time I was a workaholic, but after my first son was born I committed to change. Over the years I have done my best to practice what I preach, successfully balancing work and family life, and I encourage our employees to do the same. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my incredible wife and our great boys.

These attributes are prevalent at BA Insight, and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead. I am extremely confident that we are well positioned to enable the future of unified information access as we help visionary organizations around the world realize the value of the collective intelligence that is being captured every day within the massive volumes of content they produce.

This website uses cookies to improve functionality and performance. If you continue browsing the site, you are giving implied consent to the use of cookies on this website.
Please see our Privacy/Cookie Policy for details.Ok Privacy/Cookie Policy