Endeca Unveils New Release of Market Leading Online Retail Product

26 New Customers Boost Holiday Sales With Endeca Search and Guided Navigation Solution

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., February 24, 2004 Endeca, the only provider of advanced search and Guided Navigation solutions, announced today the immediate availability of Endeca InFront 4.1, a new version of the company's premier commerce and catalog search, navigation and merchandising platform. Designed for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce, Endeca InFront 4.1 builds upon proven innovations in information organization, retrieval and presentation to provide a single, easy-to-use platform for driving sales, providing a superior customer experience and significantly lowering the total cost of ownership.

26 new customers select Endeca InFront to drive online holiday sales

Looking to boost conversion rates and optimize online merchandising during the holiday shopping season, 26 e-commerce sites went live with Endeca InFront from September to December 2003. These include premier retailers like CompUSA, IBM, Patagonia, RedEnvelope, Hanover Direct, Orvis, Tesco, eBags, Lenox, and BMG Music.

Powering search, navigation and merchandising on more than 75 major e-commerce sites, Endeca InFront transcends legacy and homegrown search solutions by delivering quick, measurable top-line and bottom-line results. Recent examples include:

  • Orvis reported a dramatic 50 percent year-over-year gain in sales tied to site search
  • CompUSA significantly reduced database usage, realizing substantial cost savings in hardware, software and maintenance, while turbo-charging site performance
  • batteries.com reported a 30 percent increase in conversion rates - compared to the same period last year

New Endeca InFront 4.1 Provides More Insight and Control

This latest release includes new reporting capabilities and significant enhancements to the Endeca Business Studio. This tool, unique to Endeca, is designed to give merchants unprecedented insight into -- and control over -- search and navigation effectiveness, while dramatically reducing dependence on IT and Web designers. Specific new features include:

  • Conversion Rate Reporting: Quickly and accurately relates search and navigation activity to purchases, enabling tuning that maximizes sales and margins
  • Merchandising Evaluation: Improves merchandising effectiveness by allowing merchandising managers to quickly and easily understand which merchandising rules are being considered and executed based on search and browse paths as well as interaction with other merchandising rules
  • Multi-user Merchandising Management: Allows for multiple merchandising managers to simultaneously edit and manage merchandising rules by segmenting those rules based on site and organizational characteristics (brands, product lines, design zones, etc.)
  • New Content Adapters: Enable direct platform integration with a wide variety of catalog databases and e-commerce platforms

"Endeca InFront's proven ability to help retailers dramatically improve the online shopping experience and deliver quick ROI has elevated the perception of search and navigation, from a technology solution to a business solution," said Jim Baum, president and COO of Endeca. "With the introduction of Endeca InFront 4.1, retailers can quickly and routinely optimize search, navigation and online merchandising, while easing demands on IT resources and staff. The end result is a superior customer experience and significantly improved business performance."

Endeca is also announcing it has entered a strategic partnership with Web analytics leader, Coremetrics, to provide tight integration between Endeca InFront 4.1 and Coremetrics Online Analytics 2004ä, the leading Web analytics solution. The combined offering integrates two highly effective, market-tested solutions for driving e-commerce ROI, and provides existing and future joint customers with unprecedented insight into search, navigation and merchandising effectiveness. Details of the partnership are available in a separate news release issued by Endeca and Coremetrics at http://www.endeca.com/corporate-info/press-room/pr/p_022404_core.html.

Endeca Search and Guided Navigation solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors like financial services, manufacturing, information publishing, business-to-business and business-to-consumer with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content, catalog and enterprise information access and retrieval. Endeca solutions are built on innovative technology that makes it possible for the first time to offer Guided Navigation and advanced search on structured and unstructured information with high performance and low total cost of ownership at any scale.

About Endeca

Endeca offers innovative Endeca 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, a winner of Computerworld’s 2003 Innovative Technology Award, is already at work for leading retail, financial services and business-to-business companies like Barnes & Noble, Putnam Investments, and Arrow Electronics. Endeca solutions empower users to explore and discover relevant relationships in data and find accurate and precise results with unprecedented speed. This search and navigation technology can be applied across a wide-range of enterprise and customer applications including Knowledge Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), customer self-service, analytics, catalogs, directories, and portal integration. Endeca is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Endeca is an IBM Advanced Business Partner. For more information, visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.