Exalead, nine years later

In nine years, Exalead, a start-up which stemmed from the École des mines, has become one of the leading business search engines in the world. Exalead tried to establish itself in the market for general public search engines with its site Exalead.com. However, this is a market dominated by two giants, Google and Microsoft-Yahoo, and is therefore very difficult to penetrate. Nevertheless, Exalead is in the process of successfully making a name for itself both in the sector for on-line applications (with clients such as Skyrock, ViaMichelin and Pages Jaunes/Yellow Pages), and in the emerging sector of SBAs (search-based applications) which are based on the separation of the management of data bases from the implementation of applications which allow access to this data. By offering internal corporate search engines for business applications, Exalead is effectively competing with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in one part of its market. The development of software is becoming easier and quicker, and it can be handled directly by business process improvement projects, and the use of these application development projects is up to six times less expensive.