What Our Customers Are Saying...
IdeA
Improving Learning and Collaboration for Local Governments Across the UK
The IdeA (Improvement and Development Agency) Communities of Practice (CoP) Platform was developed in 2006 by Steve Dale, then Head of Knowledge and Information at the IDeA, as a space for all with an interest in local government improvement to collaborate, share information and build new knowledge online.
"The Platform enables registered members to search for content within the internal network, however when it came to a wider search on the web, users were having to use a commercial service such as Google," explains Dale. "Results were being retrieved from millions of websites so users had to filter through these imprecise results to find the correct answer."
"We approached Exalead, FAST, Google, and Microsoft for a solution to give our CoP Facilitators a relevant search platform that would only search the sites they defined," comments Dale. "It was quickly apparent that only Exalead could meet these requirements."
"Exalead, has integrated an online search box into IDeA's existing CoP user platform, which filters through trusted websites added by users. "In comparison with the likes of a Google search, which sources millions of results, Exalead retrieves a much more contextually relevant set of results and has met our need to make online research at IDeA more targeted and exceedingly quicker."
"The power that the platform gives users to view previous research carried out by fellow employees is key to our work, providing our staff with a space to build upon existing knowledge further," explains IDeA, Head of Knowledge and Learning, Marilyn Leask.
"It's fantastic when businesses and organisations recognise that search is essential in maintaining efficiency in speeding up research processes within the workplace. Leask, Dale and the KM team at IDeA have demonstrated this reliance on search in the development of its CoP Platform," explains Exalead UK and Ireland Managing Director, Raymond Bentinck. "The inclusion of Exalead's online search solution compliments this tool perfectly, providing workers with succinct and relevant information regarding key government research."
ARF (Advertising Research Foundation)
Unlocking the Hidden Value in 80 Years of Accumulated Knowledge
Founded in 1936, ARF is the leading advertising and media research organization in the U.S., serving global industry leaders like Toyota, GM, Google, Yahoo, ebay, NBC, ABC, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Foods, MacDonald's and GE.
"We are not an ivory tower...Our members use our resources to understand, make decisions, learn, become knowledgeable...'Finding' is not enough, we need to move ourselves and our members toward 'knowing'. With Exalead in place, we're enabling our members to find and discover the unique and valuable knowledge we possess, to evaluate it quickly and apply it to the important decisions they need to make."
"I was able to do the software installation and at least 98% of the configuration myself. I sent off a couple of emails to Exalead every now and then, but that was it. I'm not kidding. It was that straightforward."
Steve Rappaport, Director of Knowledge Solutions
INRIA
Unifying Access to Multilingual Resources Across 200 Web Servers
The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST).
"The ability to automatically return related topics and categories for every search query – without any customization – was one of the key points of differentiation for Exalead."
"To a lesser degree, the Systran translation module was also a trump card. The ability to configure the indexer more precisely was important to us and Exalead allowed us to specify in detail what we wanted to index and what would be accessible on the Extranet
versus the Intranet."Bruno Marmol, Head of IT, Scientific and Technical Information Management
The Scottish Government
Opening Public Access to 180K Documents, Redefining Internal Search for Employees
The Scottish Governement is using Exalead to provide online access to 180,000 pages of official documents on the www.scotland.gov.uk portal and replaced its legacy internal enterprise search system with Exalead to provide easier access to content within the organisation.
"We selected Exalead's search technology because it fulfills our need to make navigation around our internal and external sites as easy and efficient as possible. Compared with other offerings in the search market, Exalead is a cost effective, feature-rich choice.
We have already received positive responses from visitors to our Internet sites and from those using the internal enterprise search solution within Scottish Government offices."
Douglas Campbell , Scottish Government eSearch Project Manager
Rightmove
Powering Search for 350 Million Visits
This leading UK real estate portal with 350 million annual visits selected Exalead to provide access and search for its million-plus online property database.
"The British public has well and truly embraced the concept of using the Internet as the best and fastest way of researching the marketplace and looking for a home. We didn't believe that it would be economic to carry on with our original in-house search solution for another three years given our incredible traffic growth. With Exalead, we think that we should be able to give visitors better access to database of over one million properties at a more reasonable cost, ensuring that home buyers and tenants have more chance to find the home of their dreams."
"After performing an extensive technical evaluation of the other major enterprise search vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to execute on our demanding requirements. We have been very impressed with Exalead and the company's firm focus on its core search solutions which are feature rich and extremely easy to implement. Installing exalead one:enterprise has promised us the perfect combination of reduced administration costs whilst providing our customers a better search experience."
Peter Brooks-Johnson, Rightmove Product Director
The Sanger Institute
Scaling Search for 20 Billion Scientific Records
This leading scientific research organization uses Exalead to provide access its entire knowledge database for DNA and chromosomes, a database which is set to grow by 120 million records every two months, with an expectancy to reach 20 billion records in time—one of the largest publicly available search indexes in the World.
"We required a solution that can scale to accommodate large volumes of data for both our internal users and the wider research community to have access to certain projects."
"Our in-house staff and our external researcher community are now instantaneously in touch with all the information they need. We have to provide context behind the search that allows our users to navigate to the specific area of interest in a few clicks and is a unique solution over our size of index."
Tony Cox, Sanger Institute Head of Software
TeraDP
Time-Critical Access for the Newspaper Industry
TeraDP, a content management and archiving solution provider for newspapers, decided to migrate to Exalead OEM platform.
"We chose Exalead because its outstanding feature set and solution architecture would enhance our product offering and benefit both our installed base and future customers. During our migration to Exalead, their highly professional team has provided us with a straight-forward, cost-effective migration path to the Exalead OEM Edition."
"In the time-critical newspaper industry, it is crucial that Tera customers have a seamless switch to ensure their business continuity. We could not have asked for more from any other Tier 1 search vendor."
Michele Mottini, CEO
CEA
Unifying Information Access Across 150 Intranets
The Atomic Energy Commission of France is using the Exalead platform to optimize information access across 150 intranets.
"Exalead immediately rose to the fore based on scalability, results relevancy and query response speed, but the users preferred an interface that was more web-like. Fortunately, Exalead was in the process of testing the new interface for its public search engine at www.exalead.com, and we were able to give our users a sneak preview of this interface. That interface, combined with the Exalead's performance, allowed us to offer our users 100% satisfaction."
Christine Iooss, Project Director, Information Systems Division
Manutan International
Ecommerce Search for 23 Subsidiaries in 20 Countries
The Manutan Group specializes in online catalog sales of office and industrial equipment. The company is active in 20 countries through 23 subsidiaries and has more than 600,000 European customers.
"We were able to deploy it across our European subsidiaries in only a few days without making changes to the platform itself. It also included linguistics capabilities for more than 54 languages, which meant that we didn't have to develop a customized solution for each country."
Pierre-Olivier Brial, Director of E-Business
Journaux Officiels (JO)
Powering Information Access for the French Government
JO is the official French Government news agency. It produces nearly forty periodicals, publishes a large number of books, operates two web portals and maintains eight central information databases.
"The Exalead solution demonstrated its capacity to integrate a complex XML stream in quasi-real-time. We were able to integrate many of the functional requirements for each publication during the indexing process, guaranteeing proper search results. And Exalead has also responded flawlessly to our load, reliably handling from 20,000 to 180,000 consultations in a single day."
"We've reached our most important goal...We know today that we have a search tool as powerful as it is flexible. The Exalead solution has given us the ability to respond quickly and independently to the demands of our clients to bring their information online while still respecting their individual search requirements. Our responsiveness and our development options are not constrained by our search tool. As a result, we're taking on new projects without hesitation, such as revamping the site for BOAMP, a bulletin of market announcements ("Bulletin Officiel des Annonces des Marchés Publics"), a resource comprising 600,000 announcements. We know that with Exalead, we can successfully launch a much more powerful, and more user-friendly, search engine for our client."
Frédéric Porcu, Engineering Manager, Informations Systems