Endeca Unveils McKinley Release of the Information Access Platform, Allowing for Faster and Easier Deployment of Search Applications

New Platform Empowers Business Partners and Developers to Quickly Create Search Applications That Increase Revenue and Cut Costs

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search applications company, announced today the availability of the McKinley release of the Endeca Information Access Platform, a major enterprise search innovation based on a fundamentally new architecture for building standards-based search applications. The new platform is built for rapid development and maintenance of search applications that offer the highly interactive Guided Navigation® user experience across the full range of structured and unstructured enterprise data. Leveraging this new platform release, Endeca also separately announced today the release of two search-based solutions, the Endeca Commerce Suite and the Endeca Publishing Suite.



“It’s been apparent for some time that new information access architectures are a requirement if customers are to get a better handle on their businesses, and Endeca has been one of the vendors at the forefront of developing these,” says Sue Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies Group, IDC. “With the ability to search across more data more quickly, as well as the necessary tools to empower the user, Endeca is making it simpler for every consumer of information to make better and more informed decisions.”

“Business leaders, analysts and marketing executives require the ability to understand and anticipate shifts and trends more efficiently than the competition,” said John Greenleaf, Chief Marketing Officer, Financial Times Search, Newssift.com. “We partnered with Endeca to launch Newssift.com, a revolutionary site that monitors business news and the ever-changing landscape of ideas and opinions, facts and supposition. Endeca’s new platform is the foundation for our robust news site that provides customers with the ability to quickly sift through large amounts of content to make informed business decisions.”

The McKinley platform replaces traditional search engines that make building search applications too costly or difficult, and complements traditional enterprise applications by pulling together large volumes of diverse, changing information to support decision-making.

The new platform adds more than one hundred new features since its previous release, including a redesigned engine that delivers new capabilities and sets the foundation for continuing advancements in simplicity, speed, and scale. Highlights of the McKinley release include:

* New MDEX EngineTM technology for bigger, faster search applications with lower total cost of ownership. Endeca redesigned the core data storage architecture of the engine, leveraging innovative approaches for exploiting 64-bit memory architectures to access massive data volumes at unprecedented speeds. The redesigned engine is optimized to unlock the scale and performance made possible by the disruptive computing power available from today’s rapidly evolving multi-core CPU platforms.
* Simplicity: Partners are building new plug-in features and applications. The MDEX Engine technology is now extensible through an open, XQuery-based web services stack, and ships with a WS-I compliant SOAP service for easy enterprise interoperability. These new capabilities allow for easy development of entirely new search applications as well as plug-in UI features, called cartridges.
* Speed: Interactive response on diverse, changing data with less hardware. The new Continuous Query feature processes queries and data updates concurrently with no downtime, and Rapid Updates simplify and accelerate updates by allowing near real-time updating of the underlying engine. Together, these offer rich functionality while reducing total cost of ownership.
* Scale: Tens of millions of records per box. The new MDEX Engine technology can now handle more data on the same hardware – up to a 100% increase, depending on the characteristics of the information. This means sub-second response on millions of documents and tens of millions of records on a single box.

As part of its commitment to provide relevant solutions to a variety of industries, Endeca is working with a growing ecosystem of business partners to deliver and maintain applications that solve specific business problems, and to do so at dramatically lower total cost of ownership, quicker time-to-value and lower risk than other approaches.

“Our clients turn to Sapient as a trusted advisor to help them improve business performance and tap into new growth opportunities, said Chris Davey, Senior Vice President and Global eCommerce Practice Lead, Sapient. “With the launch of Endeca’s new platform, we will revolutionize the way we deliver value to our client base, allowing them to maximize the use of their current information systems with minimal incremental investment, but enormous return.”

“Endeca and our business partners solve specific high-ROI business problems with lower cost of ownership, faster time-to-results, and greater value than any alternative,” said Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca. “More than 250 million end users around the world access information with our solutions. By enabling the unscripted exploration of information, Endeca is facilitating innovation for competitive advantage among more than 600 customers across all industries.”

The McKinley release of the Information Access Platform is available immediately. Endeca will feature the new platform at this year’s Discover conference being held in Boston on June 8-10. Discover ’09 will provide an opportunity for attendees to learn about the latest product capabilities and the roadmap as customers plan for 2010 and beyond. For more information or to register, visit http://www.endeca.com/discover/.

About Endeca

Endeca is a leading provider of search applications. Search applications built on Endeca’s technology deliver the clearest visibility into information, driving hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and increased revenue for our customers. Powering these solutions is Endeca’s Information Access Platform, a major enterprise search innovation based on a fundamentally new architecture for building high-ROI applications that let users access any data from anywhere any way they need it. With this improved information visibility, customers make better choices, and employees better decisions. More than 250 million end users around the world access information through Endeca solutions, which are in use at more than 600 leading organizations including: ABN AMRO, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, the Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Endeca has operations in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information: endeca.com or [email protected].