While the IT mega-vendors get most of the attention when it comes to business intelligence (BI) platforms, an up-and-coming independent firm outdid them all to take top spot in SearchDataManagement.com's business intelligence and analytics Product of the Year rankings.

CloudView, a BI platform from Paris-based Exalead S.A., impressed our judges with its ability to access operational data in near real time, collect and analyze unstructured content, and collect data from multiple sources, including Web-based applications. The platform is also highly scalable, with one CloudView customer reportedly using it to analyze half a petabyte of data in near real time, according to the vendor.

CloudView, which shipped in September 2008, automatically collects, structures and contextualizes large volumes of unstructured and structured data from disparate data sources, including internal databases and legacy systems as well as data from Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and other Web-based sources. It features a modular, service-oriented architecture and open access APIs, allowing for easy customization, the vendor says. According to Exalead's submission form, its semantic technologies automatically analyze, categorize, enhance and align structured and unstructured data, enabling unprecedented options for global information search, access and display, and its search capabilities make it easy to find specific data.

The judges were also impressed with CloudView's ability to access data from multiple sources with minimal effect on performance of those databases and its user friendliness. The platform's Database Offloading technology indexes database data to minimize performance disruptions and lets users access the information with a simple interface without having to write complex SQL queries, according to the company.

"[CloudView is] an excellent product that is truly innovative, offers excellent performance and is cost-effective," said one of our judges.

CloudView pricing is based on the number of documents indexed and number of users, the vendor says, starting at around $50,000, including license and first-year maintenance and support costs. More information is available from Exalead.