Teragram has released Direct Answers for the Enterprise, an offering designed to search documents within corporations and provide users with simple answers. The first natural language processing (NLP) technology of its kind at work in the corporate setting, Teragram claims, Direct Answers for the Enterprise scans structured databases such as Excel spreadsheets and sales lead databases, as well as semi- and unstructured documents like text-based reports and Web pages, to provide comprehensive answers derived from multiple sources of information. Direct Answers integrates seamlessly with existing search software and does not require hardware installation. Additional benefits include:

• multilingual query processing--parses user questions into meaningful search terms;
• federation--aggregates search results from multiple sources controlled by the enterprise (including other search engines);
• scalability--accommodates unlimited amounts of information, depending on server capacity; and
• speed--scans up to 50 queries per second.

Teragram explains that Direct Answers for the Enterprise works by parsing a user's initial query and analyzing it syntactically and semantically in a process that takes milliseconds. By processing content in document repositories, enterprise content management systems and specialized enterprise applications such as e-mail programs, the product is able to deliver answers in seconds, the company says.