Spotfire® is a data visualization platform that utilizes predictive analytics. In addition to data viz, it includes data wrangling capabilities, predictive analytics, location analytics, and real-time streaming analytics. Spotfire® is a business unit of Cloud Software Group, formerly known as…
Endeca is used by both our IT and Marketing departments. It is integrated with our eCommerce platform (Oracle Commerce/ATG) to aid in search and navigation functionality. It allows us to categorize products, accessories, add-ons, etc. which is helpful for up-selling and cross-selling within our product lines. Although it is not especially easy to use, it does solve a definite need for us.
If you have complex or highly-configurable products as we do, Endeca really fills a need. It really helps with navigation and the ability to drill down into options / accessories available based on selections already made. The indexing and search functionalities are also top-notch.
If your intended users of Endeca are not very tech-savvy or have HTML experience, you will almost certainly have struggles learning how to use the tool and make the most of it. Training will be necessary. Choose a solid implementation partner.
Endeca is primarily used by our technology team for the search platform. Endeca offers search and navigation capabilities, which are fairly good compared to market standards. Using Endeca has been essential to our team's deployment of a high performance search platform on our website. In addition to this, we also manage search rules using Endeca's rule manager.
For a smaller organisation that primarily deals with simple or straightforward search platforms with only basic search rules, Endeca offers all the right tools for the job. However, license cost may not be that affordable for these smaller organisations. For large enterprises, I would not recommend Endeca since there are other more powerful tools available like Solr for similar license costs.
In my organization, we use Endeca to streamline and simplify the buying experience for our customers across all channels, and several departments are implicated in this and using Endeca. The main business problem it addresses is improving our conversion rate and increasing the number of customers who finalize their sale and minimizing the number that abandon the purchase near the last steps.
Endeca is better suited for companies that are aiming to sell across multiple channels and that will profit greatly from being able to offer their customers a smarter way to search, including recommending products during their search. If you have a simple offering for customers, then this program will be too complex for it to be worth undertaking.
Endeca as a search/navigation/promotional vehicle is at the center of our ECommerce platform for the past 10 years, and allows our business team to manage product catalog, as well as hundreds of landing pages. It provides a fairly decent basic experience (not to mention pretty advanced feature set that you can tap into), offers robust performance and stability, and mature Java API. Continuously evaluating other products in the space, I still believe we made the right choice in the first place.
Endeca is a fantastic choice for an eCommerce retailer, as it offers the structure and the data funnel ideal for this type of engagement. One aspect you have to keep in mind is the licensing cost though.
We provide consulting services to our clients that are using Endeca within the Retail industry. It's currently used as both a Search and Merchandising platform.
We work in the Professional Services Industry and use Oracle Endeca to develop eCommerce and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for our customers during our consulting engagements. We also use the tool internally for searching and navigation of our document base as well as other analytical operations across the whole organization.
Oracle Endeca Commerce offers a strong, and very competitive, Advanced Enterprise search platform. at it's core, addresses pain points related to data discovery and customer experience management. It is - by far - the best of it's breed w.r.t. search and navigation capabilities enabling people to get to what they are looking for pretty easily and quickly. It does have a sophisticated configuration model that gives power to the Business to manage dynamic customer interaction through merchandising capabilities in a cross-platform/cross-channel environment (web, mobile, other...).
High performance search and navigation queries compared to normal database systems. One of the key factors contributing to that is the Endeca flat record structure stored in a data graph format that allows for faceted navigation of records. What is called "Guided Navigation".
Fully interactive customer experience through Endeca Experience Manager tool. This tool provides merchandising capabilities which allow for the development of customized experiences based on the current web page being visited, search keywords, user segment, date time (start and/or end) faceted navigation state or a combination of all of these. Experience Manager also allows for content - or product - spotlighting as well as other capabilities of boosting certain search results to the top of the list or bury them at the end. And many other features.
The Oracle Endeca Assembler API allows for the ability to centralize all business logic and connecting to third party systems to consolidate search results, navigation options, CMS content, RSS feeds and pretty much anything you can think of into one unified response (JSON or XML) to any system or channel in the platform.
Auto-correct and "Did you mean" features are fabulous. Oracle Endeca provides a sophisticated configuration model that enables the team to tune the various thresholds for these features which allows for a tailored behavior to each industry or context.
One of the very competitive features of Oracle Endeca is that it enables business teams to choose the appropriate relevance of the search results being displayed. The team can tweak - resort or reorder - search results to show the desired list for the users. This is also possible for faceted navigation options!
The unique "Guided Navigation" feature in Oracle Endeca ONLY shows relevant/applicable refinement options to the user at any given context or navigation state. Which minimizes - a lot of times eliminates - the likelihood of 'no results'.
Handling no results scenarios through Search tuning capabilities in Oracle Endeca.
Preview capabilities for content within Experience Manager without affecting the live production environment.
Type-ahead suggestions is a very strong feature of Endeca as it provides light-weight responses with relevant options to users as they type.
Ability to connect to almost any data source with minimal effort. Documents, file systems, databases, text files, delimited files, web site crawling etc.
The workbench business tool may have it's glitches at times when trying to open content or save content. A refresh or login/logout usually fixes it.
Effort is required to integrate Endeca into any web application or platform since it provides XML or JSON that would still need to be consumed and worked with. Generally it is best to create object models in your application to read in these responses and work with them.
It is not possible to update records or taxonomy in Oracle Endeca Commerce on the fly. A baseline update process - or partial update process - has to run to update records before any changes can appear on the web application or front-end. The time it takes for this update to finish is highly dependent on the number of records in your data set (thousands vs. millions) and the amount/nature of ETL transformations you have setup in Endeca's Pipeline.
Although Endeca provides the partial update process - which allows for incremental updates to the data through out the day - the frequency of these partial updates is highly dependent on how long that update takes. The main reason is because it is not possible to run more than one update simultaneously.
Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.
The product was used across a department within the organization to support intelligent data mining for fast and efficient data gathering and reporting.
What is your budget? Expensive solution What is the size of your data set? The larger the data set the more value for your investment What is the business problem your are trying to solve? Make sure that you are clear what Endeca is good at and what you want out of it Understand what a license entitles you to use out of the Endeca product and dependencies are there to enable certain features. Do you have any experts that can help you implement your solutions. There aren't that many people with true in depth expertise in this technology.
Endeca is being used by one of our websites, which is a trade publication site dealing with the hospitality/meeting industry. It is used to power the editorial section as well as the buyers' guide section.
Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.
Dynamically-generated dimension values can be messy, hard to control.
Pipelines can get quite complicated very quickly unless the data is carefully organized beforehand.
Scalability may be an issue since I don't believe there's support for more than two MDEX servers for a particular index (I could be wrong about this, but this is what the config file implies).
There's no easy way to search multiple indices at once.
It's great for e-commerce with many useful out-of-the-box features. It is designed to help you boost your products so you can make money. However, for a non-e-commerce problem or for the case where you have multiple indeces that may need to be searched at once, I'd look elsewhere.
This selection was over 10 years ago, but implementation and cost are always key factors. We have considered going open source many times but we have been running steady for so long that changing at this point would be a huge project.
Endeca was used for content management and online merchandising. Marketers did not need to wait for IT to switch up the website and change out promotions. It helped to dynamically display products based on a business rule (for example, display products less than $XX, or of a particular brand). It defined search results. Also, it allowed us to edit HTML on web pages.
Define the search experience. For example, we were able to select which products or type of products should display when certain search terms were entered.
Create commercial web pages without IT. For example, we could create new product departments or categories by combining basic HTML and CSS.
Dynamically display the best products. For example, when we created a rule to display products less than $100, it triggered those type of products all the time and excluded products without image or out of stock.
For the most part, it is quite intuitive, however, you need to have an intermediate knowledge of HTML to be able to construct unique promotional web pages. Nowadays, with WordPress and other content management systems that have WYSIWYG interfaces, Endeca may prove to be challenging to HTML beginners.
Endeca is almost mandatory for any catalog with over 500 products. However, it is good for search. Nowadays, no one wants to navigate through multiple categories.
We use WebSphere Commerce as our main platform to deliver the eCommerce site.
When IBM starts to incorporate their software with Apache Solr, Endeca as a third party plugin search tool will not really be required as IBM has a built-in feature for using Solr. Endeca is less useful in that scenario, though it is much powerful than Solr.
It's difficult to imagine paying extra when there is a free, open-source search tool available out of the box.
We have found Solr to be much easier to learn and very handy to use. We like it much more than Endeca now.
Content management is not Endeca's specialty, and we already use either Alfresco or Adobe CQ5 for that.
We are using it to index our ATG content for guided search across our site along with targeting of specific content based on search results. It is being used at this point primarily by our ecommerce department and is web-facing for the most part. This allows us to make our web content more accessible to our user base.
Endeca is great software to facilitate site-wide search as well as guided navigation of a website. We also use Endeca "cartridges" (not sure what these are officially called) for displaying ATG code segments for specific suggestions and content targeting. For smaller organizations this would be a rather overwhelming and expensive implementation - ie. it works well for large enterprise environments.