Customers

ESR Services team is a highly technical organization specializing in Enterprise Search and Retrieval. With over 20 years of aggregated experience in network architecture and systems engineering, ESR Services team leverages best-of-breed design methodologies in order to provide customers with the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and uptime requirements demanded by high-volume search. Since the inception of the company, ESR Services team has successfully consulted, implemented, and supported closed to 100 Enterprise Search projects. Customers range from Fortune 500 to small and medium sized enterprises. ESR Services understands every customer has different level of understanding and experience with Enterprise Search and requires different type of assistance, so we have offered a wide variety of services that cover business consulting, implementation, support, training as well as on-demand services to meet your needs. The following are some sample projects that ESR Services has worked on in the past.

Pharmaceuticals

Business requirements: As proprietary internal data repositories continue to grow exponentially, pharmaceutical companies are often faced with the challenges of massive data aggregation. Customers have difficulties finding the right information at the right time, especially under the pressure of FDA inspections. In order to be more efficient, pharmaceutical companies need to improve agility of their operations and the quality of their business and market insight in order to expedite their business decision making. Current industry wisdom indicates that every day a big pharmaceutical company can save in bringing a product to market represents $1 million in savings. Big Pharmaceutical companies are looking for search solutions that interface with their diverse data sources, collaborative document repositories, intranets, wikis, document management systems and shared file storage. The ability to share the appropriate data with high value employees in one place, and to enable social networking based on that data is the holy grail. Security and cross-authentication is also a major concern.

ESR Technologies worked with a major pharmaceutical company to create an architecture that provides a common point of enterprise connectivity through search technology and security. This client required reliable indexing and information presentation of large data sources, as well as secure authentication and appropriate transparency on the user side. To achieve these and other business objectives, customer recognizes that it is prudent to use a phased approach to enhancing its search of information. The initial phase of the solution provided tangible benefits for everyday document search. This was not trivial task. It involved creating a tool that tied together numerous information sources, both internal and external. The follow-on project phases provided advanced search driven solutions which were designed to meet each business unit's goals and their primary business drivers.

Integration points: The rapid growth and expansion of enterprise data sources on legacy and newly evolving systems make it necessary to rapidly evolve massive data connectors, while at the same time controlling the hardware footprint of the search system and stewarding the enterprise's data center resources. Integration with today's enterprise requires reliable and fast connections to such industry standards as for example Oracle, Lotus Notes, Documentum, Microsoft products, intranets, file shares and other points of specialize data integration. Security concerns require that there is appropriate cross-authentication impacting the desired transparency of the user's search experience.

Time to market: ESR Technologies worked with the client to design a system that can deliver enterprise reliable search in a phased approach, bringing the enterprise to search capability in a rapid and scalable fashion. Since information is a measurable currency in the Pharmaceutical industry, there is a positive bottom line impact from rapid deployment of each phase. This project is a model for both enterprise scalability and rapid testing/deployment planning.

Intranet Search

Intranets pose their own search challenges, especially when dealing with financial institutions, and others with highly confidential business information. ESR Technologies has deployed intranet search for many Fortune100 financial institutions, addressing such requirements as:

• Integrated LDAP and scoped search
• Forbidden query terms
• Connecting to disparate content systems
• Adopting operating standards of the enterprise
• Preventing unwanted indexing of secure content

Content Discovery:

• Understanding who is publishing content
• Determining where content lives
• Monitoring versions of content
• Understanding relationships between disparate content

Publishing

Having helped scientific and other journal publications bring search to their content stores, ESR Technologies has extensive experience working with the changes faced in the Publishing sector. Some of the common issues addressed with media publishers include:

• Content de-duplication
• Continual updates and indexing
• Providing tools for administrators to remove content from the index on demand
• Tight integration with publishing content life-cycle processes
• Large data through-put, and continual updates to indexes
• Multi-lingual search and content processing
• Subscription models and scoped search results

Yellow Pages

With extensive experience in deploying business directories, ESR Technologies has helped launch several major directory search installations. Leveraging technologies such as geo-search, and "sounds-like", these installations handle high query volumes and deliver quality results while leveraging complex business rules to support their revenue model. The challenges of Yellow Page type searches include:

• Tens of millions unique records
• Timely updates and removal of records
• Complex business rules determining rank and visibility of results
• High volume query management
• Data cleansing and massaging to expand on and clean-up generic business data

Vertical Search

By providing a specialized search engine for niche verticals, ESR Technologies has helped create sites where the audience is more targeted, and the amount of traffic represents site value to advertisers. ESR Technologies has created vertical searches that are language specific, country specific, and domain specific. Leveraging our in-house RSS connector framework for greater throughput, these installations maintain large lists of URL feeds, use custom configured crawlers, and also leverage customized connectors to internal repositories ultimately creating well-defined, highly specific content, tailored for niche audiences and the long tails of the web.

Scientific Research

At a center for world-class scientific research, ESR Technologies has worked on a project that requires integration with the client's existing search environment. One of the requirements of this client was that they maintain functionality of their current query language to prevent from re-training thousands of longtime users on a new tool, and to allow them to continue their work unencumbered. To do so, a query translator was constructed from ANTLR, an Open Source tool used for grammar recognition. The tool leverages a template style approach which allows customization on the fly, should either the source or target language update.