Listening to the Customers’ Story
by Pete Bell
My favorite part of the Endeca year just started with our sixth annual call for Navigator Award nominations, recognizing the most visionary Endeca deployments. What’s most fascinating to me about the awards is hearing our customers tell their stories in their own words.
We have our own narratives about each facet of the Endeca story. For example, the dev and product management organizations build towards user personas, like Melanie Merchandiser, our retail super user who is an expert in product promotions but who is not an expert in IT. Dozens of personas like Melanie are composites of the hundreds of people like them we hear from out on the front lines. Then from that product artifact, we need to tell more stories like ones for sales, services, education, and user experience. The point is, the personas are grounded in reality, and so in turn our stories match our customers really well. But despite all that, the Navigator entries surprise me every time.
The kernel of our Agile BI story comes from a Navigator entry a 
couple of years back. RS Components started as an Endeca B2B ecommerce customer, using faceted search to help buyers find components. But then RS started using the platform internally to build out an Agile BI app. Their use case: having acquired several smaller distributors in Asia, they found they couldn’t make sense of their business. That’s because each acquired company had its own ERP system — whether Oracle or SAP, each with idiosyncratic schemas – and so to get visibility across them all, they’d need to reconcile them into one data warehouse. But by the time they completed that project, maybe a year later, the business had changed. Instead, they put the data into Endeca, getting an immediate rough cut, helping them to revise their application, lather, rinse, repeat. According to our narrative, our value to RS was primarily in letting them report on both structured and unstructured content for the first time. But to them, the value was in rapid iterations, made possible by pouring in multiple schemas – another face on looking across semi-structured data. Here’s how then-CIO Richard Boynett told me the story.
eBags is one of my favorites. It’s a David and Goliath story, where they beat up giants on a modest budget. Their secret – drawing on founder Peter Cobb’s background in catalog marketing, they get big results by testing endless tiny improvements to the site – which is the retail equivalent of the Agile BI story.
One ecommerce customer reported in their Navigator entry that they saw a $270 million increase in revenue in the first year after deploying Endeca, which is a lick more than even our bold marketing story would pitch. The Auto Trader guys did a Rashomon, telling their story from multiple perspectives, one a business story from their search product manager, one an IT story from their chief technical architect. And there are many more like this.
The race is on for 2010, and I can’t wait to hear the stories.
