In an exclusive interview, Iqbal and Zubair Talib, senior managers of Intelligenx, reveal that referrals have fueled the company’s rapi growth. Intelligenx has a leadership position in directory and “yellow page” search in South Africa, South America, and elsewhere. The company’s profile, despite its US headquarters in suburban Washington, DC, is modest.

The father-son team said:

It seems that our international clients are actively talking about our technology at international conferences. We can always do a better job of marketing, but we put our customers first. Sales occur because people come to us and say, “We want to license your system”… we maintained certain relationships among an elite group of scientists and engineers. We never signed up to give marketing talks at the marketing-oriented venues. Our success comes because certain people understand our technology and recognize that it delivers scale, speed, performance, data management today. Our technology is our marketing.

Unlike search and content processing firms who issue news releases when a Web site signs on to use a well-known search engine or when a vendor announces for the second or third time a reseller deal, Intelligenx keeps innovating and selling.

The company’s system offers almost all of the features associated with the best-known vendors in the search market sector. The Talibs said:

Intelligenx was first to market with technology that offered a true full-text search with what many people call faceted or assisted search results. To achieve this functionality, performance under heavy loads is the prevailing challenge and simply put, our Discovery Engine® solves the problem in what we think is a most elegant fashion “Facets” or “guided navigation” are not just a “checkbox” on a feature matrix but an underlying central philosophy in our technology, the company, and in the development of our system.

You can read about the company’s new stream processing of information, what the Talibs call “cluster flow”. In addition to near real time index updating, additional metadata are generated without adding latency to the system. Another interesting feature of the Intelligenx system is that a licensee can provide its sales people with a real time view of what advertisements are germane to a popular query. The sales person is able to show a prospective advertiser a live report of traffic and the payoff from an advertisement in a specific context.

The company’s technology offers an alternative to the better-known MarkLogic system and the specialist firm, Dieselpoint.

You can read the entire interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. The full text of the interview is part of theSearch Wizards Speak feature. The exclusive interview is the 13th in this series of first-person accounts of the origin and functionality of important search and content processing systems. Click here to read the interview.