Category: Kudos

Wednesday 11 July 2012 – 2PM – 3PM (UTC/GMT)

Discover how you can empower your frontline staff to instantly boost customer satisfaction and sales simply by adding an agile front-end to your existing information systems.

It’s a well-known secret. In spite of the lofty promises of CRM vendors, most sales and service organizations continue to experience undesirable levels of dissatisfaction and churn on the part of both customers and staff, as well as failing short of their full revenue potential.

In this webinar, join speaker Benoît Bourdé to learn how organizations like La Poste, Lagardère and Jaspersoft are using EXALEAD technology to break through these challenges and fulfill the promise of their CRM investments. Deployed rapidly and non-intrusively as an agile front end to existing systems, EXALEAD ii for Frontlines automatically:

- Gathers and organizes information organization-wide in real-time using advanced semantic technology
- Generates 360° customer profiles complete with interaction timelines
- Produces real-time, cross-silo reporting on global KPIs
- Delivers an intuitive interface that shields workers from the complexity of underlying systems while still delivering seamless workflow integration

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On the Agenda:

- The 360° customer service challenge
- The search-based application approach
- The ii for Frontlines application
- Value for end users, business managers and IT
- Product demonstration

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

Most of the time, business software demos are not completely honest; editing often skips a few steps considered “uninteresting” for the viewer. But today, we’d like to share with you an unedited version of a special challenge we posed to one of our engineers: can you build a search-based application in only 10 minutes, live, with two hundred people watching? Our brave engineer took on the challenge, tackling an A to Z process with the clock ticking, including connectivity setup, data extraction, indexing, search results configuration and user experience creation with our Mashup Builder.

In this challenge, he built an SBA for reporting & analytics on the coffee market. Amusing choice as you will see there’s no need for caffeine to easily and rapidly create an application with EXALEAD CloudView! All the actions are performed through dedicated graphic interfaces, designed to deliver a unique user experience, free of file editing, XML and obscure commands.

For those of you new to SBAs, you’ll note the app goes far beyond the realm of “classic” search. It’s an example of the way CloudView’s advanced semantic capabilities, great calculation features, performance and scalability are being used to create high-value user experiences ideally suited to the challenges and opportunities of today’s Big Data world.

On June 7th, Exalead clients and partners gathered at the Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine to share their experiences with Search-Based Applications (SBAs). Exalead CEO Laurent Couillard reflects on the energy of the event:

“This annual conference is a cornerstone of our SBA engagement. Our own vision is immeasurably enriched each time we have the opportunity to come together and share experiences with our partners and clients. Their creativity and innovation is inspiring. Together, we’ve made dramatic progress in using SBAs to solve tough IT challenges and to open up new market opportunities, and the Search-Based Application revolution has only just begun…”

Laurent Couillard partnered with Morgan Zimmermann, VP Sales Worldwide,
to kick off the conference, first with a look back at the evolution of the Search-Based Application model, and then with a look ahead to the innovations
on the horizon for 2012.

The conference was centered on the real-world SBA experiences of clients like Randstad, the world’s second largest HR services provider; La Poste, France’s national postal agency, and travel and tourism leader Voyages-sncf.com (SNCF group sites are the third most visited in Europe after Expedia and Priceline), as well as Exalead partners like Capgemini, Business & Decision, ST Groupe, Bull, Décisionnel, Keyrus and CSC. The evening was topped off with the official launch of CLuE, the new CLub of Exalead users, an announcement toasted from the panoramic terrace of the Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine.

Thank you to all our customers and partners for sharing your experiences at this special event!

Enjoy the video, and see you next year !

Though we’ve been discussing Search-Based Applications (SBAs) in this blog (and on our website) for some time now, don’t feel alone if you’re still not quite sure exactly what SBAs are and how they work. Now Morgan & Claypool Publishers has come to the rescue with a new book, Search-Based Applications: At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies written by Exalead’s Chief Science Officer Gregory Grefenstette and resident writer and analyst Laura Wilber.

Published as part of the Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services series edited by Gary Marchionini of the University of North Carolina, the book provides students, researchers and professionals alike with an understanding of the significance, function, capabilities and limitations of SBAs. Along the way, the authors shed light on the growing convergence of search and database technologies, with particular emphasis on the recent evolutions in search technology that are enabling the SBA revolution.

They also situate the SBA phenomenon within the larger context of evolutions taking place on the Web, including conceptions of the Deep Web, the Semantic Web, and the Mobile Web, and what these evolutions may mean for the next generation of SBAs.

You can take a sneak peek at the first chapter and other excerpts at www.searchbasedapplications.com. See also the review by Martin White on Intranet Focus.

Congratulations Gregory and Laura!