Endeca Latitude Delivers First Hybrid Search-Analytical Database for Business Intelligence

Enables easy exploration of data and content to support daily decision-making, gives IT centralised platform for rapidly deploying BI applications

LONDON AND CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – October 4, 2010 – Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search and business intelligence (BI) company, today announced Endeca Latitude, a new BI product that combines the simplicity of search and the power of BI to improve daily decision-making in the enterprise. Based on the industry’s only hybrid search-analytical database, Endeca Latitude is the only product that gives IT a centralised platform for rapidly deploying BI applications on diverse and changing data.  Endeca Latitude is also the only product to enable BI applications that guide people to better in-the-moment decisions. This improved discovery in daily decisions – one at a time, millions of times over – drives hundreds of millions of dollars in decreased costs, increased revenues, and improved productivity.

While traditional BI tools succeed at reporting on and exploring structured data in pre-determined data models, today there is a greater need for in-the-moment information discovery so that people with no training in the technology can get answers to unanticipated questions. Endeca Latitude enables the rapid assembly and configuration of BI applications that bring together diverse data sources to provide discovery – the ability to ask new, unanticipated questions that lead to better outcomes. Because of its breadth and flexibility, a single discovery application built with Endeca Latitude can take the place of hundreds of traditional BI reports. Applications developed with Endeca Latitude follow user experience best practices pioneered in the world of eCommerce, allowing business people to use them productively with essentially zero training.  According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting, “Companies need BI tools and applications that combine the simplicity, and resulting zero training, of a search-like UI on top of reporting, querying, and analysis to make BI pervasive throughout the knowledge worker community.”(1)

Business Speed and Complexity Require New BI Capabilities
Today’s organisations need greater agility in operations and decision making. This drives new requirements for the BI infrastructure, such as the need to support decisions made by front-line employees and managers, plus the need to easily integrate a greater volume and variety of enterprise data and content. Traditional BI has struggled to support the level of agility required.  Endeca Latitude meets these challenges by providing the following benefits:

- No data left behind. At the heart of Endeca Latitude is MDEX Engine™ technology, the industry’s only hybrid search-analytical database designed to bring together all of the information required for making critical business decisions, regardless of its original type, format, or source. This allows users to explore data and content in an unconstrained and impromptu manner, rapidly addressing new questions as they arise. Bringing together diverse datasets without complex modeling and integration, the engine conducts search, navigation, and analytics. With support for IT-managed data governance and data security as well as industry standards such as XQuery, XML, and SOA, the MDEX Engine is designed to fit easily into existing enterprise architectures.
- Consumer ease-of-use. BI applications built with Endeca Latitude, called discovery applications, guide people to better decisions. The Discovery Framework, part of Endeca Latitude, provides a library of components that deliver advanced search capabilities, Endeca’s patented Guided Navigation® experience, rich visualisations, and analytics for the rapid configuration of discovery applications. This enables IT organisations to respond to changing business needs by re-designing reports and dashboards in minutes, incorporating diverse data sources in days, and deploying entirely new applications in just a few weeks.
- Agile delivery. Endeca Latitude supports an agile approach to deployment that reduces the data modeling and integration, and application development inherent in traditional software deployments. It provides powerful integration capabilities through the Endeca Content Acquisition System (CAS), an extensible framework for ingest of a broad range of unstructured content, and through support for best of breed data adapters and ETL tools, such as Informatica. These tools enable rapid integration of both structured data and unstructured content and the flexibility to easily add new data sources.

“When more employees make daily decisions on clear and complete evidence, a company gains competitive advantage. While traditional reporting is valuable and must continue, companies need a new approach to enhance and extend their BI capabilities,” said Paul Sonderegger, chief strategist at Endeca. “To improve the agility of the BI infrastructure, IT organisations must take a new approach to provisioning exploration and discovery to any process where it may be needed.  Discovery applications built with Endeca Latitude are right at the intersection of search and BI because our technology, honed in eCommerce environments where users demand ease-of-use and zero training, empowers interactive exploration other BI models simply don’t support.”
 
Dozens of visionary Endeca customers are currently using Endeca Latitude in areas such as sales and marketing promotion analysis, warranty issue root cause analysis, and part selection and sourcing analysis for designing new products.

For more information on how Endeca brings discovery to daily decision-making and agility to enterprise IT, the following resources are now available:

- The Endeca Latitude demo;
- The Endeca Latitude data sheet; and
- Whitepaper from Endeca entitled, “Reinvent Your Business with Agile BI Infrastructure”

(1) April 2010, Forrester Consulting, Agile BI: Best Practices For Breaking Through the BI Backlog