Endeca (discontinued)

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.

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.

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 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.

Large amounts of data that need proper taxonomy.

For ATG it's probably the best catalog search engine.

Well suited as an information discovery platform, currently not recommended for experience management.

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.

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.

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 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.

E-store requirements.

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.