Mike C Sees

Wondering what the newly announced WebSphere Content Discovery Server is and where it came from?

Line56.com writes that it evolved from the acquisition of iPhrase. Tony Frasier of IBM says that 40 percent of the legacy iPhrase base was in financial services, definitely an information overload vertical. “Search is an issue in any information-rich environment. The tax implications of dissolving a retirement account differ based on whether you’re in California or Ohio,” says Frasier, by way of example. “You have to take the context of the user into account.”

“Search is a huge issue in retail — if you can’t find just what you want, you won’t buy it — but not a lot of companies have nailed it. A case in point is IKEA, which had a very shoddy search system until Line56 called attention to it and prompted the company to adjust its technology.

This is what iPhrase’s technology takes into account. “You have to be smart about limiting the search,” explains Frasier. iPhrase is always looking to limit the search by assessing the customer’s location, what products they own, and other relevant data culled not just from a customer relationship management (CRM) repository but from whichever system in which it may reside.

Users have a certain degree of flexibility because they can tap into iPhrase’s contextual search interface from within a CRM application or from within the IBM WebSphere Portal.