GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, ORLANDO, FL. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., October 10, 2006 -- Endeca, a next-generation information access company, today unveiled the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) 5.0, a major new release that combines the ease of search with the analytical power of business intelligence. The Endeca IAP 5.0 brings together all the tools and techniques necessary to speed information discovery and analysis -- search, Guided Navigation®, ad hoc analysis, visualization and text analytics -- into a single, interactive user experience. It also introduces a wide range of new and enhanced capabilities, including Relationship Discovery, extended enterprise integration and best-in-class business control features to help organizations quickly deploy new classes of rich information access applications, while ensuring that applications rapidly adapt to evolving business goals. As a result, the Endeca IAP 5.0 gives organizations new abilities to inform decisions and derive insights that increase revenue, optimize resource allocation, ensure compliance, and improve overall business performance.
"From the inception of Endeca, our research and development efforts have always focused on putting people -- not machines -- in control of information access and discovery. The Endeca IAP 5.0 represents a major milestone in the user-centric approach to finding and analyzing information," said Adam Ferrari, chief technology officer of Endeca. "By introducing new ways to keep information in context throughout the access and discovery process, while eliminating the barriers to deploying new classes of rich applications, Endeca is giving organizations a versatile platform to transform information into a key competitive advantage."
The Endeca IAP 5.0 represents a pioneering example of unified information access technologies. These technologies are designed to unite disparate content and data, while offering intuitive, interactive tools -- like search, navigation, alerting and visualization -- to enable new classes of user-centric information access applications. Unified information access technologies are currently being applied to solve information discovery, enterprise search, knowledge management and self-service business intelligence problems. And they are increasingly serving as the foundation for next-generation applications that support regulatory compliance, product design, human capital management, customer data integration (CDI), intelligence analysis, and master data management (MDM).
For example, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) uses the Endeca IAP to provide analysts with new ad hoc reporting and discovery capabilities on dozens of disparate intelligence data sources. Endeca's flexible and adaptive security model allows the release of information to various levels within the analyst community and its coalition partners. As a result, Endeca has helped reduce the time to find and analyze intelligence information and is facilitating departmental collaboration. These benefits gained are an integral component of DIA's new SOA-based intelligence discovery platform.
"Surveys show that the demand for unified information access applications has grown significantly over the past year, and vendors from both sides of the data and content divide are racing to help customers fill gaps in their business intelligence," said Sue Feldman, VP of Content Technologies at IDC. "Traditional business intelligence (BI) applications look at quantitative data. They can find "what" is happening. They ignore unstructured information -- the information that provides the "why". Vendors like Endeca, who offer new kinds of hybrid architectures, can do both. They are poised to disrupt the market for information access."
New Relationship Discovery: New, interactive text analytics capabilities complement the Endeca IAP's search, Guided Navigation, analysis and context-sensitive presentation capabilities -- all integrated in a single user experience and all powered by Endeca's MDEX Engine™ technology -- to speed information discovery and offer benefits not possible with standalone enterprise search, database and text analytics approaches
Best-in-Class Business Control: New features add to the platform's best-in-class Web-based Management Suite to put business users in control of Endeca applications, reducing dependence on IT and application developers, and ensuring that information access applications adapt rapidly to evolving business goals
Extended Enterprise Integration: New, out-of-the box adapters and expanded SOA support complement the Endeca IAP's rich integration capabilities to speed application development, simplify integration with key enterprise infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership
This combination of new and enhanced capabilities can be applied to support a wide variety of applications and business processes, delivering significant advantages. For example, businesses can provide the context needed to make better decisions by giving workers new classes of information access applications that deliver a single, interactive view of information -- scattered across disparate systems -- related to specific customers, products, suppliers, locations, and more. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can give analysts a new generation of discovery tools to instantaneously reveal and explore unexpected connections hidden in large volumes of human and signal intelligence data. And publishers can increase page views per session (and related ad views) by dynamically linking and promoting content that shares related people, places or concepts.
"Quality search is an essential tool for recall, but search alone does little to encourage exploration and discovery -- key elements if you wish to meet all your users' goals," said Stephen Dunn, Chief Technical Strategist, Guardian Unlimited. "Capabilities in the Endeca IAP 5.0, like Relationship Discovery, introduce new flexibility in how to reveal related information to users, and could offer us new ways to expose the full breadth of relevant content. We are also pleased to see Endeca's continuing investment in the operational aspects of the platform, from performance and scaling to orchestration and deployment."
The Endeca IAP 5.0 will be generally available in November 2006.
About Endeca
Endeca is a next-generation information access company, uniting the ease of search with the analytical power of business intelligence. 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, Cox Newspapers, Dice, The (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, The Home Depot, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, The Library of Congress, Nike, and Walmart.com rely on Endeca to power business-critical applications that increase revenue, reduce costs and streamline operations.
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA, Endeca is a private company with worldwide operations. For more information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.