New Technology Offers Preview of Whats Beyond Search
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 27, 2006 Endeca, a next-generation search and information access company, today introduced the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) a new platform built specifically to address an emerging market that is poised to fundamentally change the way people access and interact with information. The platform is designed to help people find, analyze and understand information in ways not possible with search engine, database and business intelligence solutions. Powered by Endecas MDEX Engine technology, it fuses the ease of search and browsing with the analytical capabilities of business intelligence, bringing Endecas trademark Guided Navigation user experience to new classes of applications. As a result, organizations can increase revenue, decrease costs and streamline operations by helping their customers, employees and partners answer high-value questions with unprecedented ease and confidence.
The Endeca Information Access Platform aids information-based problem solving across a wide variety of business processes, including eCommerce, marketing campaign analysis, product design and parts reuse, knowledge management, customer service, and more. To meet highly specific industry and application requirements, Endeca offers a range of Market Solutions, each designed to accelerate time-to-market and maximize return on investment. These solutions combine the benefits of the platform with unique application modules and deep market and application-specific services expertise. In a related announcement, Endeca today unveiled a new, expanded line of these solutions.
In the era of Google, search engines have become synonymous with the act of searching for information. But people are much more flexible and inventive than the simple search box gives them credit for. Comparing, contrasting, making trade-offs, even performing ad hoc analysis are all part of information-seeking behavior. Past technologies artificially constrained these skills, said Steve Papa, founder and chairman of Endeca. Endeca is the first company to offer a single, unified approach to these complementary activities and the business processes they support. The Endeca Information Access Platform represents the next step in our vision to bring this approach to virtually every activity where high-value information supports decision making.
The markets for content and data access technologies once clearly distinct camps are rapidly converging. And with good reason, since they all seek to solve the same problem – finding and understanding information across the enterprise, said Sue Feldman, VP for Content Technologies at IDC. We expect this new opportunity and market to reach into multiple billions of dollars by the end of the decade, far exceeding todays $900 million enterprise search market. Endeca`s new approach positions them well to capitalize on the converged markets.”
As evidence of this growing trend, Endeca customers have begun using Endeca solutions across their enterprise to address problems that would have previously required multiple, disparate technologies to support — or would have been impossible to solve. For example, IBM, which first purchased an Endeca solution in 2003 to support an eCommerce application, has since deployed seven applications of Endeca, ranging from customer-facing support applications to performance management dashboards to a radical human capital management application that IBM has used to improve project staffing for its Business Consulting arm reducing the time required to staff projects from weeks to days. Following the success of an Endeca-powered equity derivatives navigator, global financial institution ABN AMRO recently purchased Endeca for the banks 400 corporate intranets to support regulatory compliance initiatives. Indigo Books & Music, Canada`s largest book retailer, uses Endeca to power both its online storefront (http://chapters.indigo.ca) and its in-store, self-service kiosks. Likewise, World Book, who currently uses Endeca to help customers access the encyclopedia companys wealth of rich content and articles, has plans to use Endeca to power its online storefront.
The benefits that Endeca delivers for our online encyclopedia application both to end-users and to our IT staff can be realized across a wide array of applications, said Tim Hardy, chief technology officer at World Book. It allows us to do things that would be impossible with traditional search approaches.
More about the Endeca IAP
The Endeca IAP is distinguished from other technologies in several key ways:
Patented meta-relational architecture, powered by MDEX Engine technology, delivers a fundamentally better user experience: Supports greater flexibility and certainty in decision making; Encourages exploration and discovery by revealing relationships in data and content and presenting them as contextual refinements, expansions, and other manipulations; Shows all the possible but only the valid next steps at every step, no matter how complex the information; Fuses the ease of search with the analytical power of business intelligence.
Information Transformation Layer enriches and unites disparate sources of critical information: Transforms and enriches information by uniting disparate sources while maintaining, augmenting and even creating relationships across data and content; Turns implicit relationships in long-form documents, Web pages and multimedia files into explicit structure through a combination of entity extraction, rules-based and statistical classification, and taxonomy generation techniques; Integrates and indexes virtually any type of information (multimedia files, Web pages, text documents, relational database tables, ETL extracts, etc.) from multiple information stores (Websites, file servers, content management repositories, enterprise applications, e.g. CRM, ERP, PLM, etc.); Offers seamless integration with service oriented architecture (SOA).
Data-driven Application Components enable rapid deployment of rich, dynamic applications: Simplifies creation of robust, feature-rich applications that would have previously required armies of developers and hundreds of man-hours to build; Search, navigation, reporting, charting and other presentation features help app developers create and deploy dynamic websites and enterprise applications without the need for extensive resources; Reduces maintenance and optimization as all of the key features and functionally automatically adjust to changes in the underlying data.
Web-based Management Suite puts application control in the hands of business users: Empowers business managers to direct the right information to the right end users at the right time; User-friendly tools and a simple Web-based GUI helps business managers optimize applications through the use of context-sensitive presentation rules; Gives non-technical staff ability to apply their knowledge of the business to configure presentation by session, user, location, time and more; Puts application optimization in the hands of those responsible for delivering business results, while significantly reducing demand on IT to support Endeca-powered applications.
Enterprise-class platform delivers scalability, reliability and security: Designed for high-demand, high-performance enterprise and Web applications; scales linearly across commodity hardware; Provides exceptional security by tracking user entitlements and permissions at the very lowest level ensuring sensitive content is never compromised.
For more information on the Endeca Information Access Platform and its capabilities, please see: www.endeca.com/resources/pdf/Endeca_Technical_DataSheet.pdf.
About Endeca
Endeca is a next-generation search and information access company. Combining patented intellectual property, breakthrough science and a deep focus on user experience, the Endeca Information Access Platform helps people find, analyze and understand information in ways never before possible. Leading global organizations like ABN AMRO, Bank of America, Boeing, Costco, Cox Newspapers, The (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, The Home Depot, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, Lehman Brothers, The Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com rely on Endeca to power business-critical applications that increase revenue, reduce costs and streamline operations.
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Endeca is a private company with operations in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information: www.endeca.com or [email protected].
Contact:
Craig VerColen
Endeca
617-577-7999
[email protected]
Danielle Stead
Racepoint Group
781-487-4615
[email protected]