Micro Focus
Case study

Switzerland-based Systematic Engineering and Consulting accelerates discovery and indexing results with its i5 Search Appliance built on Micro Focus IDOL, enabling a 360-degree view of business-related information

Switzerland-based Systematic Engineering and Consulting or SEC 1.01 AG has been a system integrator for major IT providers. The firm has implemented business-critical solutions for health, finance, government, transportation, education, utility, and telecommunications customers.

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SEC 1.01 AG

Industry

Information Technology

Location

Switzerland

Product

Challenge

A gold mine of data hides within most enterprises. Precious nuggets reside in emails, databases, and podcasts. Uncovering those trinkets can prompt a novel idea or moneymaking product. Outside of the company, business news can help employees spot a trend, tamp down an issue, or figure out the way forward. However, the challenge lies in the time consumed probing colossal volumes of unfiltered, unrelated news and data. Little wonder that businesses yearn for ways to conduct meaningful searches and tap the results they really need.

Solution

SEC 1.01 leverages the searching and indexing capabilities of the IDOL Information & Data Analytics platform to drive its i5 Appliance search engine. SEC’s i5 Appliance enables comprehensive discovery of internal company information from 400 data sources – whether in file share, database, SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange Server email, or numerous other formats. Additionally, the i5 Appliance searches data on news websites, online newspapers, governmental information, and social media channels.

“A lot of companies don’t have a way to find important business-related information quickly through one interface and get a 360-degree view of a topic,” says David Meyer, SEC’s Chief Technology Officer. “With our i5 Appliance built on Micro Focus IDOL, company personnel can search for any information they are interested in, save the search details without having to search every day, and receive immediate notification of any new information that surfaces. They have access to that information wherever they are – through their PCs or mobile devices. We’ve cut the time spent searching for information in half.”

Results

Discover the Unknown Unknowns

According to Meyer, IDOL software provides an easy-to-use, indexing platform for efficient information management.

“We saw that Gartner ranked HP IDOL [now part of Micro Focus] as the best enterprise search platform,” Meyer notes. “There are capabilities to transform speech to text, analyze images, and conduct OCR (optical character reader) on images and PDFs.”

SEC enhanced and developed a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to ensure high levels of operability and stability on its i5 Appliance. Meyer says, “We acquired substantial software capabilities on the IDOL platform to build an appliance that we can install in one or two days at a customer site. I see our competitors trying to parcel open source products together, but IDOL is already there with a complete ecosystem of needed components.”

Along with an application agent that saves search criteria and automatically delivers the information, SEC designed a single interface in its i5 Appliance to streamline data from more than 1,000 file formats. The i5 Appliance based on Micro Focus IDOL also supports 150 languages, metadata filtering, and mapped document security, which limits access to sensitive internal documents.

“Micro Focus IDOL helps with concept extraction, filtering, statistics, and linguistic differences,” Meyer explains, “so it can understand human information and provide related concepts. You can find things you weren’t searching for or that you didn’t know were related. It helps discover the unknown unknowns.”

News They Can Use

A Switzerland economic forum secured an SEC i5 Appliance to provide rapid results for its conference attendees searching through meeting presentations, speeches, and archives. The i5 Appliance is prized for being able to locate specific speech and text in videos, photographs, and podcasts.

SmartInfo, another SEC customer, employs the i5 Appliance in its news subscription service. No need for customers to watch many news broadcasts and read numerous newspapers daily. They get informed of pertinent news on all sources, including print, audio, video, or social media.

“The feedback we’ve received is there is no other engine that provides a comprehensive view of the Swiss information market,” Meyer comments. “That means our search engine can be a lead generation engine also. Making decisions and generating leads are always based on being well informed.”

SEC uses its own i5 Appliance mainly for demonstrating search capabilities to potential customers. It operates on two ProLiant DL380 servers and 3PAR Storage. SEC logs user activities and queries in a Vertica database. Built on the database is a dashboard enabled by a Logi Analytics self-service analytics portal.

Like its customers, SEC considers the i5 Appliance based on Micro Focus IDOL a valuable tool for building efficiency in decision-making and gaining insights into what actions to take.

“When you don’t spend a lot of time capturing information from everywhere and you can find everything in a short time, you have strong performance in making decisions. We enable customers to focus more on their business by providing them with an engine to search documents and relevant information,” Meyer concludes.

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SEC 1.01 AG case study

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release-rel-2020-11-1-5433 | Wed Nov 11 20:52:47 PST 2020
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release/rel-2020-11-1-5433
Wed Nov 11 20:52:47 PST 2020