Australia’s ISYS Search Software has won an exclusive multi-million dollar contract to provide its Document Filters technology to erp giant SAP to power its new generation of enterprise applications.

ISYS Document Filters technology will replace Oracle’s OutsideIn and Autonomy’s KeyView products across all SAP platforms when it is implemented in around 12 months time.

ISYS’s proprietary Document Filters technology is the core analytics ‘engine’ that allows organisations to search, process, find, analyse and view (in high definition) large volumes of text-based data.

It was developed to extract value from ‘unstructured data’ (such as emails, presentations and documents). That is, the 80% of data that sits inside organizations in multiple formats, and which cannot be handled currently by existing database systems.

Isys Document Filters technology powers the ISYS enterprise search software suite and is also licensed separately as an OEM product.

SAP will be embedding the Isys Document Filters technology to load data into its HANA database to support business intelligence blending unstructured and structured data. The product supports over 440 different document formats

“SAP is known to help companies of all sizes and industries run better. Its decision to embed ISYS across all of its enterprise applications reflects the importance they attach to providing a best-in-class search, indexing and analytics capability to its Large and SME clients” said ISYS CEO, Scott Coles.

“Our software is the result of continuous investment and innovation over many years. The Document Filters technology itself is IP that we own and developed from scratch ourselves, and have continued to evolve it in collaboration with our key partners. Today, we are pretty much the only player in the market that can say this. It reflects our long term commitment to the enterprise search market” he added.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Derek Murphy said the Document Filters technology was a key part of Isys’ own enterprise search solution, but since being split off as a separate OEM product 18 months ago was now providing strong revenue from third party software vendors.

“Its a fundamental piece of our own technology stack and what we’ve done is licensed that piece out to SAP.”

“Documents coming into a system come in all sorts of formats and what you need is a straightforward way to get that text, the metadata and the attachments so that you can then build compliance and analytics applications as SAP will be doing.”

“One of the challenges of Business Intelligence (BI) is dealing with unstructured content. The first step down that path is being able to get the content out if documents and normalise that unstructured content into something useful so you can then do analytics on it, and that’s where we come in.”