GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, SAN FRANCISCO -- April 24, 2007 -- Endeca Technologies, Inc., an enterprise information access software company, today announced the immediate availability of a major, new release of the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP). Designed for extreme scalability and high performance, the new native 64-bit release introduces the most significant enhancements to Endeca's signature Guided Navigation® experience since it was first unveiled in 2001. These enhancements make possible new classes of information access applications that involve the exploration and analysis of interrelated data from high-value enterprise data sources. As a result, businesses can now create an interactive, 360 degree view of related information to support the decision making of thousands of employees or millions of customers.
"The popularity of Guided Navigation is based largely on its ability to guide people through a discovery process -- revealing both the information available and the next set of questions that a user can ask. Until now, most applications of Guided Navigation have focused on a single perspective specific to a central record type, like a product, person or company," said Jason Purcell, Vice President of Product Management at Endeca. "In this latest platform release we have extended the Guided Navigation experience to multiple, simultaneous concepts, eliminating the ages-old data modeling constraint of a single center of the universe. It is now possible for users to ask increasingly complex questions and switch between multiple perspectives to discover and analyze interrelated information."
The new Guided Navigation experience is based on the real-world requirements of Endeca's clients, spanning the inherently complex data of retail, manufacturing and financial services environments, as well as emerging front and back office demands of the Fortune 500. It allows the navigation of complex relationships between different information from different sources -- like parts, suppliers and vehicles; or trades, securities and accounts; or customers, orders and products -- and will lay the foundation for a new generation of supply chain, multi-channel commerce, CRM, eDiscovery, business intelligence applications and more (see example).
For example, automotive manufacturers are now able to create applications that expose the interrelationships in the supply chain between suppliers, vehicle sub assemblies and components to help engineers select parts to be used in new vehicle designs. Multi-channel retailers are able to create online storefronts that help thousands of concurrent shoppers to search and browse products based on the characteristics of those products, specific in-store inventory and pricing for nearby stores, and the types of consumer reviews associated with them. And marketing and sales organizations can create new classes of CRM applications that support customer segmentation and campaign targeting based on the past purchasing behaviors of customers by product line, location and business size.
"The ability to view accurate, timely related data from a variety of perspectives is key to informing decision making," said Dan Verdeyen, Director of Application Development at CDW, the $6.8 billion provider of technology solutions for business, government and education and a long standing Endeca customer. "By making this kind of capability accessible to thousands of decision makers -- at scale and at interactive speeds -- Endeca is helping to lower the barriers for a new generation of applications designed for company-wide problem solving. We are looking forward to leveraging these capabilities in future applications."
Other highlights of the latest version of the Endeca IAP:
"Good information access requires a complex and configurable set of features" said Sue Feldman, IDC's Vice President for Content Technologies research. "IDC believes that unifying access to multiple sources of information, both unstructured and structured, across multiple applications and data stores, is an absolute requirement. The technologies to support information access must be in place to provide consistent access to any and all information. These technologies include search, browse (Guided Navigation), text analytics, data mining and information visualization. By unifying what has been traditionally two separate platforms (BI and search/browse) into a single information access platform, it's finally possible to find all the interrelationships across repositories in order to get a complete view of the enterprise. That's worth time and money, and it mitigates risk as well."
More about the Endeca IAP
The Endeca Information Access Platform helps people explore, find and analyze data and content to make highly informed decisions. Combining search, Guided Navigation, analytics, visualization, geospatial filtering, contextual content presentation capabilities and more, the platform offers an array of user-friendly features designed to encourage discovery and analysis of related information by a wide audience of users. In addition, the Endeca IAP's unified indexing technology gives organizations new abilities to integrate related data and content from disparate data stores and applications -- regardless of format, source or structure -- to provide users with the full context around their results.
The Endeca IAP is an integral component of popular Web offerings (e-commerce, online publishing, directories and classifieds, online travel and corporate Web sites) and next generation enterprise solutions (eDiscovery, compliance, customer relationship management, human capital management, knowledge management, strategic sourcing, self-serve business intelligence).
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.