CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 15, 2002 -- Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation solutions, today announced that leading US home furnishings retailer Crate and Barrel, will deploy 3.0 of Endeca InFront, the latest version of Endeca’s product for commerce and catalog solutions. Endeca InFront 3.0 offers industry-leading enhancements to its Guided Navigation and integrated search capabilities. Crate and Barrel will use Endeca InFront to power its site search and offer shoppers the power of Guided Navigation from the site’s search box.
Crate and Barrel will implement Endeca InFront 3.0 to enhance the overall shopping experience and provide a faster, more efficient way for shoppers to find the products they are looking for. "The online channel continues to be an area of significant growth for our company and we want to expand on that success through investment in the best technologies," said John Seebeck, Director of Internet for Crate and Barrel. "Endeca’s search solution makes good sense because it provides our customers with the ability to search in multiple ways yielding results that will take them where they want to go while exposing them to items they may not know exist."
"We are pleased that Crate and Barrel has recognized the strengths of Endeca’s enhanced search offering, and that they are going to be implementing Endeca InFront 3.0," said Steve Papa, founder and CEO of Endeca. "Search is an important part of the e-commerce equation and our solution combined with the power of Guided Navigation will help to greatly enhance and extend the value of the Crate and Barrel shopping experience."
Endeca InFront 3.0 Offers New Search and Guided Navigation Functionality
Crate and Barrel is one of the first customers to implement Endeca InFront 3.0, powered by version 3.0 of the Endeca Navigation Engine. Endeca InFront 3.0, now supporting Windows 2000, as well as Solaris for both SPARC and Intel, is the only approach to search that bridges structured and unstructured data, helping users to refine and explore their search results by navigating the precise set of associated structured data.
The new version of Endeca InFront advances the integration of search across full text fields and structured data, with enhanced spelling-correction and relevance ranking features, all at tremendous speed and scale. Other new features include expanded support for all content pages such as customer service documents and FAQs as well as popular document formats; enhancements to both the functionality and ease-of-maintenance of the user-defined thesaurus; and suggested alternative matches, made by comparing phonetic matches with a statistical analysis of the underlying data structures.
"With the release of version 3.0 of Endeca InFront, Guided Navigation further solidifies its position as the most productive way for users to find actionable information in data, including products in a retail catalog, engineering specs in product data sheets, and customer records in an account database," commented David Gourley, CTO of Endeca. "Crate and Barrel is just one of many companies across a variety of business sectors that can benefit from its versatility."
Endeca solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors like retail, financial services and business-to-business with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content and catalog management as well as enterprise information access and retrieval.
About Endeca
Endeca offers innovative Guided Navigation information delivery solutions for companies who need to integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve the business problems associated with information overload. Endeca technology is already at work for leading retail, financial services and business-to-business companies like Barnes & Noble.com, Fidelity Investments, Eddie Bauer, Spiegel, Tower Records, Arrow Electronics, Putnam Investments and IHS Engineering. Endeca solutions empower users to explore and discover relevant relationships in data and find accurate and precise results with unprecedented speed. Patent-pending algorithms provide a scalable, Web-based infrastructure for data exploration, leading to highly relevant and meaningful results every time, and this technology can be applied across a wide-range of enterprise and customer applications including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, catalogs, directories, search and portal integration. Endeca is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Ampersand Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About Crate and Barrel
Crate and Barrel (www.crateandbarrel.com) was founded in 1962 as an importer/retailer for tabletop products, and is now the leader in America's home furnishings industry. In 1973 the company entered the catalog business and in 1999 its Internet site was launched.