Endeca Introduces Version 3.5 of Award Winning Guided Navigation Platform Now Featuring Expanded Enterprise Search Functionality

Version 3.5 Enhances Search and Unique Guided Navigation Features; Expands Platform Compatibility and Adds Language Support

Cambridge, Mass., April 22, 2003 Endeca, the only provider of Guided Navigation and advanced search solutions, today announced Version 3.5 of the Endeca Navigation Engine, its award winning, patent pending technology platform supporting Endeca ProFind and Endeca InFront solutions. With Version 3.5, customers will now be able to extract a new degree of value and business results from corporate data. Now, enterprise customers using Endeca ProFind can search, navigate and access data across more than 225 file formats. New security features allow users to set up access control lists while consumers, using Endeca InFront, will be able to access personalized Custom Catalogs and use new geospatial functionality, completely integrated with Guided Navigation, to locate relevant information more quickly.

"The next generation of information finding tools must be able to help the user do more than basic search," said Sue Feldman, vice president, Content Technologies, IDC. "Users need to explore and browse information. They don’t always have the right words to search. Endeca interacts with the customer to provide logical pathways, or suggest related materials. By connecting users easily to the products and information they need, either by searching or browsing, or a combination of the two, Endeca has demonstrated that their software can pay for itself by generating increased revenue for their customers."

Expanded Enterprise, B2B and B2C Search and Navigation

From its inception, Endeca ProFind has empowered enterprise users with the tools they need to find only relevant data, as well as discover information they may not have realized existed. With Version 3.5, Endeca ProFind has now been enhanced in two critical areas:

  • Content Integration - Endeca ProFind now includes converters for over 225 file formats, including word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software and graphics files, further expanding the ability to search and navigate a broad array of enterprise content.
  • Access Control Lists - When combined with Endeca ProFind’s existing content security and authentication integration, Access Control Lists ensure enterprise security is fully respected when searching and navigating content, and customizes Guided Navigation options based on the permissions of each user.

Endeca InFront combines search with Guided Navigation and dynamic merchandising, helping Endeca’s customers to dramatically boost sales, raise conversion rates and increase user satisfaction, no matter how large and complex the database or catalog. With Version 3.5, Endeca InFront now offers:

  • B2B Custom Catalogs - critical capability enabling business customers to search and navigate on personalized views of a large B2B catalog tailored to their own preferred vendors and products. This enhances the value of the B2B catalog and makes it easier for B2Bs to manage the requirements of their diverse customer base.
  • Geospatial Search - expanded B2C catalog search and navigation functionality that allows customers to navigate content based on location and proximity, with Guided Navigation choices perfectly tailored to that location. For example, customers can allow users to search for hotels within a certain distance of a city or zip code.

Endeca customer Arrow Electronics uses Custom Catalogs in their Global Explorer application so users can easily access the information in their extensive electronic components database. The "Master List" feature allows organizations to upload an Approved Vendor List (AVL), and manage it within the application. This allows users to toggle between views of only their AVL, and the entire catalog, to make comparisons or substitutions, when necessary, early in the design cycle. "This is the Wow factor for our customers: ‘Wow, I haven’t seen that before’," says Paul Hibner, Manager, Engineering Services of Arrow’s Global Information Business. "We came up with this concept, called Master List, and Endeca helped us implement it."

Management and Reporting Enhancements

Administration and management of Endeca-based applications has been enhanced significantly through improvements to the Endeca Studio and an updated Endeca Reporting module.

  • Easier Set-up and Management - the Endeca Studio offers ease of use for setting up and managing search, navigation, and merchandising. It has been enhanced to make it easier for technical and business users to control all aspects of Endeca search and navigation applications.
  • Superior Reporting Capabilities - the Endeca Reporting module provides superior out of the box reporting on 50 key metrics, such as most popular searches, failed searches, a wide array of performance metrics and advanced feature usage, such as spelling correction and synonyms. In addition to an easy to use HTML report, administrators can create custom reports with Endeca’s flexible logging and reporting framework. This provides valuable insight into user behavior and allows technical and business users alike to tune Endeca-based applications for superior performance and results.

Expanded Platform Support

The flexibility and functionality of the Endeca Navigation Engine platform has also been enhanced with Version 3.5 to include:

  • External Taxonomy Integration - allows customers to easily import any existing taxonomy into the Endeca application and present this to users, in addition to displaying any other taxonomies constructed within Endeca itself.
  • Additional Operating System Support - supports Linux, in addition to existing support for Solaris and Windows 2000. Windows Server 2003 upon release (expected from Microsoft late April).
  • More API Support - includes a new .NET API (using C#) to complement the existing Java and COM APIs. This further expands the environments in which customers can deploy search and navigation applications based on the Endeca technology.
  • New Foreign Language Support - provides full support for Western European languages (over 20 languages in total, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) is now built into the product, enabling search and navigation across multilingual or foreign-language sites.

"Our experience with customers and prospects in the market has driven a majority of the new, specialty search, navigation and compatibility enhancements now available with Version 3.5," said David Gourley, Chief Technology Officer for Endeca. "The end benefit to users is a better way to access and find information using a more robust and flexible technology platform that meets a variety of information retrieval needs across the enterprise."

Endeca solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors including retail, financial services, manufacturing, information providers 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 advanced search and 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, Putnam Investments, Eddie Bauer, and Arrow Electronics. 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 search results every time. 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. Endeca is an IBM Advanced Business Partner and is a preferred provider of IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Group. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.