Question: Patrick, first a few words on you, and the company you manage.
Answer: I have been involved in Computational Linguistics since my PhD at the University. I developed the SYLEX product out of my thesis (which was thus demonstrably accurate...) and it has been acknowledged as the most accurate and the fastest by the CNRS (Grace project). Pertimm SARL is now selling a product with even more advanced linguistics.
Question: Who are your partners? How did you meet and decide to start a business?
Answer: Xavier Mignon is mostly known as a data base specialist (he introduced Oracle in France). Among many other things he also installed the first ever system using optical drives in the French Assemblée Nationale. He is also a gifted photographer and writer. He is our marketing/sales manager. Jean Poncet is mostly an "anything specialist", he wrote operating systems, object database systems 10 years before even Oracle was created, language compilers, music software and did many things out of the computer domain (journalist, theater director, ...). He is our architect and international business developer ( USA for the time being). I met those two guys some years ago while they had developed the core of Pertimm (i.e. the repository architecture) and they were looking for what they termed "a usable linguistic package". On my side, I was looking for a storage solution for the enormous linguistic data that I got from my linguistics. The wedding of the two products took less than 2 days... and then the fathers married together (so to speak)...
Question: What is Pertimm?
Answer: Pertimm stands for its name: PERTinent and IMMediate! As just said, Pertimm is the result of an incredibly powerful and fast linguistic powered by the fastest storage system on the planet today, both for recording and getting data back. It's a technological platform the most obvious application of which is what is known as a "semantic search engine". But as we feel we're some steps ahead of that, we call Pertimm a "discovery engine" instead. The speed allows Pertimm to be interactive and the linguistics allow this interactivity to be meaningful, helpful and information packed for the user. But the patent for which we applied is titled "The Reverse Computer" which means that this platform is the exact equivalent of a computer equipped with it's operating system, except that, being reversed, it's the first computer to be "upside up"!
Question: Can you tell our readers why you decided, with your partners, to build a search/discovery engine?
Answer: Xavier and Jean have been involved in many artistic projects (theater plays, concerts, books, etc.) as well as seminars about business intelligence. And for all these they needed a REAL search engine to dig in the thousand of books and documents hosted at Xavier's. Even though speed was not really the major issue, absence of proper linguistic and flexibility made all products useless for their particular needs. As for me, searching technology is one of the natural outcomes of linguistics. But let's point out that the issue it is not so much to find data we know are there than to DISCOVER new stuff as the world spins on...
Question: Who are your competitors, if any?
Answer: Everybody is! As all systems have some of our functions. Besides their famous magic quadrant, the Gartner Group also uses a matrix of linguistic technologies and we are proud to say that we fill almost all boxes in this matrix, while all famous big boys are in fact only in a few of these boxes. We can prove mathematically that all the components of our system are optimal, and this also shows as a differentiating factor when speed and cost effective hardware setup are part of the decision issues.
Question: Is the market for search engines local or global?
Answer: The search is all the more difficult when the amount of documents increase, and this means that the most search-hungry companies are the largest. Pertimm being the only translingual product, its implementation is doomed to be worldwide. When enabled, translingual functions allow you to express your request in your favorite language, or even any mix of languages, and get relevant documents in all available languages used in your corpus. This is the reason why we are located on both side of the Atlantic.
Question: What makes Pertimm so performing?
Answer: I would say that it's because of it's solid grounding. Nobody cares about basics anymore, and that's often why products are so deceiving. Processing speed is a bad answer to awkward design... Everything of computer software technology has been revisited. For instance, in spite of mathematician deciding that a sorting routine cannot be faster than n Log2 n (n being the number of items to sort), our sort is linear. This is the foundation of the "no-scalability issue" feature of Pertimm. Then the storage as practiced by databases has also been overthrown. The gain in speed is over 4 orders of magnitude (database designers inquiries welcome...). And I may say that my linguistic, already revolutionary at the time of Sylex has now undergone its second revolution!
Question: Who uses your engine?
Answer: A great diversity of people, as a matter of fact. It goes from little installation in a department of a company to over 20.000 users at ANPE (on a single Pentium server). Techniques de l'Ingénieur and WEKA is using Pertimm to provide access to thousands of technical and legal books. And http://www.biotech-intelligence.com is another example of the many applications Pertimm can handle.
Question: Is Pertimm a costly solution?
Answer: No and no... That is, it is one of the cheapest to buy, and definitely the cheapest to operate as it runs on its own and unattended. Pertimm is what Americans call a "day one" product: install it, set your preference parameters and go. Compare that to the host of people who are necessary when you install those monster systems that won't even do 10% of what Pertimm provides, often cost 10 times more, and for which the day to day operation doubles (if not worse) the cost!
Question: How do you see your development in a near future?
Answer: Pretty nicely. We are still owners of our company and alive while many others have been bought or have disappeared. The planet is going to need more and more accuracy in data access and the more demanding the request, the best fit for us. We are already giving people solutions for which we are the only provider. And the demand is fast growing…
Thank you, Patrick
Christian Girard
Chief Editor
October 11th, 2004
More information: www.pertimm.com