Zulaware making database searches intelligent

BOULDER ? For a couple of guys who founded a start-up to develop powerful new search technology, Gary Feuerman and Michael Wegener are not easy to find. When they aren’t toiling away in Zulaware Inc.’s quiet offices on the second floor of the Elim Tabernacle of Christ church in Boulder, they are sequestered away in their homes, both of which are off the power grid somewhere up Sunshine Canyon in the foothills west of Boulder.

One of the benefits of this lean living style and conservative cash flow approach, said Chief Executive Officer Feuerman, is that Zulaware is ?eminently fundable.? The company is staying in ?slow-burn mode,? so that it can more easily attract a $2.3 million round of funding from the investment community. So far the company has raised more than $800,000 from friends and angel investors since its inception in February 2000.

With that money, Zulaware has been developing its as-yet-unnamed signature product, which it hopes to start selling by the end of the year. The product is search software that learns from the efforts of those who have searched on it previously. By filtering, cataloging and refining the most relevant documents and databases after each search, it becomes an increasingly effective way to get to the right information quickly.

?Zulaware is built around the premise that the effort put in around finding information should not be thrown out when you’ve found it,? said Izzy Reinish, the company’s chief operating officer and a veteran of the information-retrieval business.

Aaron Katz, who befriended Feuerman in New York City when Feuerman practiced law there, is an early investor in the company. ?It was very intriguing to me that they are on the way to developing a search engine that can actually use prior searches in order to make future searches more powerful,? he said. ?It’s a so-called intelligent search engine.?

Zulaware’s product, however, is not the kind of search engine that usually comes to mind, like Yahoo! or Google. ?We are an add-on to existing search engines,? Feuerman said. ?We are not in competition with the search engines themselves.?

Its technology will likely be licensed to companies for internal use only ? companies that are having trouble managing vast databases and numerous documents and are trying to minimize the amount of time its employees spend looking for useful data.

?We can customize it to work with any search engine on the Internet or with any information retrieval system for any document that resides on a network,? said Wegener, who is Zulaware’s chief scientist. The company has five full-time employees, but hopes to have close to 25 by year’s end if it receives funding.

The company uses a taxonomical approach to the search process, whereby it classifies, catalogs and remembers relevant documents or Web pages after every search. Aside from indexing the search process, the product also produces a graphical representation of how the search was executed, illustrating the thought process that went into the search. The company calls this ?social filtering.?

For example, someone at a sporting goods company starts a search for information on graphite tennis rackets. After typing in the appropriate keywords, the person finds documents in his company’s database and out on the Web. He submits the ones he thinks are relevant and useful to Zulaware’s software for indexing. The next time a person at that company does a search for information on graphite tennis rackets, she will pick up where he left off, immediately calling up the most relevant documents from the initial search, instead of starting the search from scratch.

?This tracks the evolution of a culture, whether it’s a corporation or a community,? Feuerman said. ?The value comes with use. We’re really about the human-driven process.?

Zulaware is targeting its product at content publishers, like Lexis-Nexis, and at content-management software companies, like Documentum, which provides document management services to giant corporations like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel and PepsiCo. Feuerman said Zulaware’s technology would likely be embedded into Documentum’s larger document-management solution, but as of yet, the company has not signed up any clients.

?There are verticals that hunger for this kind of document shortcutting,? said Whit Andrews, a research director in the electronic search, e-commerce and Web applications sphere with Gartner Inc. Andrews said law, pharmaceutical and high-tech research companies and firms are prime candidates for Zulaware’s technology.

?Any of these people who are paid $100,000 to $150,000 a year, management really wants to maximize their time,? he said.

But he warned that the knowledge-management field is crowded with anywhere from 15 to 20 enterprise search engine companies, including Microsoft Corp., Verity Inc. and Autonomy Corp. Andrews suggested that Zulaware concentrate on developing its software rather than on creating a large direct-sales force. He also suggested that it stay out of the public portal business. Instead, Zulaware should form partnerships, make original equipment manufacturer agreements or eventually groom itself for a buyer, he said.

?They’re not going to outshine Verity, but Verity and companies like that are always looking for acquisitions,? Andrews said.Contact John Aguilar at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail jaguilar@bcbr.com.

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