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.
Pros
It provides powerful search functionality.
It adds functionality for navigation which makes it much easier for customers to use our commerce site and find what they are looking for.
Cons
More documentation for the product would be very useful.
The product almost requires training in order to be able to use it effectively. Knowledge of HTML is a must.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
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.
Pros
Possibly the best tool for a basic/simple search platform implementation
XQuery works well
Rule Manager is a very useful tool
Cons
Endeca's page builder is not fit to be an enterprise product - it is just BAD!
It is not easy for a non-user to understand Endeca quickly
Multi-index search (or any complex search implementation) is not easy to setup in Endeca
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
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.
Pros
Simplifying our cross-channel selling strategy.
Improving search for customers.
Increasing sales from our multiple selling channels.
Cons
Steep learning curve.
Difficult to set up.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
High performance search platform for structured and unstructured data
Contextual navigation
Cons
Business tooling to support experience management for web platforms
Improved information access layer (i.e. assembler), currently perceived as a bottleneck to the high performance mdex engine
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited as an information discovery platform, currently not recommended for experience management.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
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...).
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Professional Services (51-200 employees)
The product was used across a department within the organization to support intelligent data mining for fast and efficient data gathering and reporting.
Pros
Filtering
Fast reads and data extraction from large data sets
Good user interface and tools to support the technology.
Cons
Better documentation that can be accessed easily
Simplify the product and its dependencies
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Endeca drives our website search and category organization, navigation, and filtering. We use it to execute queries and organize results.
Pros
Does what you tell it to do
Its logical in its execution
Cons
IT needs extensive training to understand it
It is moderately flexible
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
