Support corporate customers that need to leverage increasingly large, increasingly complex data and document repositories to accelerate business processes and decisions.
One of SkyMedia’s primary offerings is its Expert Support System 2 (ExS2 ) Software as a Service platform. This web Java EE application, which is deployed on Red Hat JBoss servers, supports litigation management workflow, decision support, document generation and review, and related functionality.
To support these processes, ExS2 must access tax, litigation, and administrative documents across each customer’s document landscape, which typically includes both Internet-based and proprietary databases. Often, the documents are written in either Italian or English; it’s also common for material to be French, Spanish, or Russian. In addition, the document repositories are updated continually with new documents added and existing documents modified on a daily or even hourly basis.
With this environment, SkyMedia equips its ExS2 platform with robust and flexible big data search, analytics, and security functionality including continuous indexing, automated classification against customizable taxonomies, and strict access controls. The solution must support the organization of documents into knowledge bases. And it needs to help users quickly identify conceptually relevant search results.
Ciro Borrelli – CORPARATE TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
SkyMedia SRL
SkyMedia SRL is one of Italy’s leading IT consultancy companies. Document and knowledge management services are one of SkyMedia’s marquee offerings. “Managing document and data repositories is a growing area of concern for today’s corporations,” notes Ciro Borrelli, Corporate Technology Officer, SkyMedia.
“On the one hand, the information stored in these repositories is more business-critical than ever before. On the other hand, the repositories themselves are larger, more complex, and more difficult to manage.” To help these businesses, SkyMedia invests in cutting-edge technology designed to drive value from big data document assets. And today, a cornerstone of that technology is the big data software from Micro Focus: the IDOL enterprise search and data platform and the Vertica Analytics Platform.
Last year, SkyMedia began seeking a big data search platform to integrate with ExS2 . It looked at Cogito, but after comparing that tool to IDOL, SkyMedia decided that the Micro Focus solution was a better fit. “IDOL offers a rich menu of language and functional configurations that are ready to use as soon as you install it,” Borrelli explains. “It is simple to update configurations and reorganize indices.” Because it would be so much easier and faster to put IDOL to work, SkyMedia decided to integrate the unstructured data analytics solution with its ExS2 platform.
After implementing the IDOL solution, SkyMedia was very pleased with the solution’s performance. “We used IDOL to search a repository of mostly scientific and legal indexed documents,” says Borrelli. “With more than 500,000 indexed sections, our retrieve speeds were 99 percent faster than SQL searches.”
Another market SkyMedia supports is healthcare, where SkyMedia customers need to perform fast searches on digital health records. Because healthcare data repositories can grow extremely large, SkyMedia paired IDOL with Vertica to support fast query times. The results were impressive. “We benchmarked a collection of 600,000 health records, and obtained complex query results in less than five seconds,” says Borrelli. “Our Vertica searches were five times faster than SQL searches. And what really surprised us is that Vertica also produces data mining matrices more than 20 times faster than other relational database servers, such as Oracle 11g and SQL.”
“As corporate data and document repositories grow in size and complexity, companies need better ways to find what they need, when they need it,” Borrelli concludes. “By leveraging the IDOL and Vertica solutions, SkyMedia delivers exactly what our customers require.”
