As promised, this is a follow up blog about a deployment at one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies committed to discovering, developing, and delivering innovative medicine to patients.
The organization’s complex environment includes data in numerous silos, both in the cloud and on-premises. This includes SharePoint, Veeva Vault, website content, databases, and home-grown applications built on Elasticsearch. They also had a desire to leverage Amazon Kendra, an intelligent search service powered by machine learning.
To access and leverage all of this disparate IP data, the organization required a web-like search experience with a single search box to find everything. They needed to be able to unlock all of their mission critical data so that their employees could easily find it and use it. They needed to stop reinventing the wheel by recreating things that already existed, not to mention the time wasted searching for information.
It was impossible to address their requirements via a single index. They decided to run a proof of concept comparing three indexing solutions. In the end, they selected Upland BA Insight’s hybrid search deployment includes multi-index search approach leveraging SmartHub, Smart Previews, and our ConnectivityHub Platform, the foundation for all of our indexing connectors.
SmartHub provided the company with a single search box to find everything their employees needed to effectively do their jobs. Moreover, with SmartHub’s orchestration layer, they were able to federate the large cloud-based data sets, ensuring fresh search results. SmartHub also supports both keyword and natural language search for a more internet-like search experience.
SmartHub federated six indices, which included SharePoint Online, Amazon Kendra, and Elasticsearch. The customer also uses indexing connectors for ServiceNow, Amazon S3, files shares, web sites, Yammer, and SQL.
In order to rapidly access important sections in large documents, they also use Smart Previews. This means that end users are no longer required to download entire documents. Instead, with one click, they are instantly presented with the most relevant pages with hit highlighting, which includes a “hit map” of other relevant sections.
With Upland BAI’s modular architecture, we delivered an enterprise search solution quickly, in months, not years, accelerating the return on value for the customer. Moreover, the new search solution provided our customer with a competitive advantage, reducing research time during drug development.
The end result of the project is that employees now have a “Google-like” search center where they can find everything they need relative to their roles. No more wasting time hopping from system to system to look for information. Before Upland BAI, employees were forced to search individual enterprise applications. Each system with its own unique search interface, making this even more confusing and cumbersome.
In my final blog installment, I will highlight two more interesting hybrid search deployment projects. The first one is a large, publicly-traded, manufacturing company. The second example is one of the largest multi-national law firms in the country. The point here is that ALL organizations, regardless of their size, industry, location, etc. have similar search challenges.