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New York Life
Company Overview
New York Life is the largest life insurance company in America and one of the largest in the world. They provide a variety of securities products and mutual funds.

Challenges
New York Life's existing intranet search was fragmented and unable to return relevant results. They decided to go with a GSA solution from Google to greatly improve their user experience. Their content was spread out across a diverse array of systems, including Vignette V6 and V7, IBM WebSphere Portal, and Oracle databases, all run by different development groups. In addition, they had unique security requirements which required viability testing for delivering secure content. They needed help in configuring the GSA to answer all of their problems, by crawling all their content, delivering secure search, and providing search to their enterprise applications. In order to ensure the success of the project, a short term proof-of-concept was executed, and LTech was chosen to participate.

LTech Solution
LTech worked closely with New York Life's development team and provided guidance and solutions on a wide array of GSA topics. LTech was able to:

  • Develop and present options for implementing secure search on top of NYL's unique infrastructure.
  • Create XSL stylesheets to mimic the look and feel of their existing web properties.
  • Modify in-house applications to make backend calls to the GSA, taking advantage of advance search (metadata) functionality.
  • Index and search content and metadata from New York Life's variety of intranet applications.
  • Create metadata-and-url crawls to gather metadata from external databases and incorporate it into the GSA's index.
  • Author a "Findings and Recommendations" document detailing the results of the proof-of-concept, and providing recommendations for the full blown implementation.


Results
The proof-of-concept resulted in a functioning secure search implementation for New York Life. A plan for full scale deployment was delivered, allowing New York Life to staff and execute the project.

PC Magazine
Company Overview
First released in 1982, PC Magazine is a biweekly magazine published for technology professionals with previews and reviews of new hardware and software. The magazine, which spawned an online edition in 1994, contains articles written by experts in the field of information technology.

Challenges
PC Magazine wanted to improve the search feature on their website. With thousands of products and reviews available to search on the site, they needed a way to provide more organized and relevant search results.

LTech Solution
LTech set up PC Magazine with a custom Google Search Appliance implementation, which allowed users to search products grouped by category, price, brand, and more.

Results
LTech was able to customize the GSA in order to reflect the company's needs and the requirements of the site. The Google Search Appliance helped PC Magazine give their users faster and more relevant search results, as well as various filtering options.

Fidelity
Company Overview
Fidelity Investments is a group of privately held financial services companies founded in 1946. They serve more than 21 million investors and operate centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Challenges
Fidelity (Devonshire Investors) needed assistance with integrating the GSA into their intranet search application, as well as integrating Single Sign On through Windows authentication.

LTech Solution
LTech implemented the GSA Windows Access Connector to provide Single Sign On.

Results
The integration went smoothly and Fidelity was satisfied with LTech's work. Tight integration with active security allowed users to securely retrieve search results without logging into multiple systems.

PayPal
Company Overview
Paypal is an e-commerce business and subsidiary of eBay which allows consumers to make secure payments over the internet without using traditional paper methods. PayPal processes transactions for online vendors and other sites.

Challenges
The PayPal website offers a link with a "comment card" for users to rate and comment on their PayPal experience. At the time, all data was sent to OpinionLab with no simple way for PayPal employees to access it. PayPal required an easier means of searching the responses they received from users.

LTech Solution
LTech configured and implemented a Google Mini, working with PayPal and OpinionLab to create a search interface for PayPal employees. With the Google Mini, other servers and code were eliminated, making it much easier for PayPal to access user suggestions and ratings.

Results
The new search interface enabled Paypal employees to browse users' comments themselves. This provided a much more efficient way for Paypal to evaluate suggestions in order to determine possible improvements for the site.

Mayo Clinic
Company Overview
Mayo Clinic is a world-renowned medical practice located in Rochester, Minnesota. With a consistent ranking by many sources as one of the top hospitals in America, their model for clinical practice is internationally acclaimed.

Challenges
The Mayo Clinic needed help with general GSA setup and best practices. They also had some unique requirements around processing and displaying custom OneBox results given variable business rules.

LTech Solution
LTech rewrote the stock XSL stylesheet that ships with the GSA to support advanced OneBox processing.

Results
The setup went smoothly and the project went live on time. LTech successfully completed a prototype on mayoclinic.com, enabling the client to quickly and efficiently roll out their GSA search to other web properties.

Market America
Company Overview
Market America is a product brokerage and Internet marketing company with over 500 employees and 3 million customers. With more than 1,000 partner stores, search engines, and more, Market America has pioneered an online shopping experience where their customers can find anything they need all in one place. Market America has generated over $2.4 billion in accumulated retail sales with its revolutionary One-to-One Marketing concept.

Challenges
Market America wanted to build a new system for searching ecommerce products in order to bring better search results and features to their customers. With 2,000 partner stores and over 50 million products for sale, Market America needed a way to provide more convenient search. After analyzing the necessary specifications, they determined that Google was the only search engine capable of handing the robust search experience they wanted to offer.

LTech Solution
LTech developed a full featured merchandising system to give Market America full control over search results to feature partner products, cross-sell MA products, and aggregate affiliate products from Linkshare, Commission Junction, and Performics for a very powerful comparison shopping experience. Following the proposed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), LTech engineered a scalable search service that abstracted the intricacies of the search appliance enabling search across the enterprise. This service was configured to call an array of Google Search Appliances to service over 3 million products.

Results
The Google Search Appliance and enterprise enhancements have allowed Market America to provide their customers with an easy and intuitive search experience. With faceted navigation and comparison pricing, customers can sort products by price, store, and brand. More intelligent product grouping allows customers to navigate results more easily, saving them time and energy. Market America's advanced user-friendly search matches people with the products they are looking for, increasing sales and revenue.

Nodus Solutions
Company Overview
Nodus Solutions is a consultancy focused on helping clients solve unique business challenges using a wide range of products and services. Nodus takes pride in their extensive experience and maintaining a strong relationship with clients.

Challenges
Nodus Solutions needed custom setup work for a Google Mini, which would not work with a handful of their IP addresses.

LTech Solution
During the initial install phases of the Nodus Google Mini appliance, LTech offered services over the phone with Nodus IT staff onsite. Soon LTech had successfully completed an integration of a Mini appliance into Nodus's enterprise network.

Results
Within an hour of configuration and testing, Nodus's Mini had started crawling various data stores for content. The integration into their custom written applications served data to thousands of users each hour. Nodus Solutions was extremely pleased with the quick response time and services delivered by LTech.

EmployOn
Company Overview
EmployOn is a job database with over 7 million jobs available to employers, recruiters, job seekers and workforce development professionals. EmployOn uses concept-based technology to search, match, and manage job information.

Challenges
EmployOn wished to update their resources while reducing the costs associated with maintaining local development. At the time, EmployOn had five database serves, four separate development servers, and over one hundred production servers, all of which needed to be consolidated in order to reduce the amount of time required to maintain the infrastructure. They also wished to increase overall search relevancy and speed.

LTech Solution
In order to consolidate all hardware, LTech used a VMware server capable of virtualizing all four original development servers onto one machine. Similarly LTech combined EmployOn's five database servers into one and migrated their production server infrastructure from over one hundred down to five. This significantly reduced both time and cost of maintenance. LTech also upgraded EmployOn's search system from autonomy to a Lucene search platform as part of an effort to improve search results.

Results
The client was extremely happy with the services provided. With EmployOn's new system, they were able to run more smoothly and efficiently while reducing overall IT and development costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Upgrades to their search infrastructure also helped reduce their overall IT costs and created a more efficient, user-friendly search system for both Jobs and Resumes.

Corning
Company Overview
Corning Incorporated is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. Drawing on more than 150 years of materials science and process engineering knowledge, Corning creates and makes keystone components that enable high-technology systems for consumer electronics, mobile emissions control, telecommunications and life sciences.

Challenges
Corning was unsatisfied with the built-in search features of the Microsoft Commerce Server, which they used for the Corning Life Sciences Online Catalog. With a total product count of about 20K, they turned to LTech and the GSA. Corning needed a custom coded solution to modify their VB.Net built website to interact with the GSA and Commerce Server, as well as custom pricing on results and product comparison options.

LTech Solution
LTech assessed the problems and determined a solution for the Corning development team to implement. This solution included a custom feed/index process to push Corning's products into the GSA with appropriate meta-data, as well as a plan for developing a .Net bridge for the GSA. Ltech also performed all GSA admin functions during the development process and produced a deployment plan for the Corning Operations team.

Results
LTech's implementation of the Google Search Appliance gave Corning and their customers an efficient and easy-to-use product search. The search speed has improved by over 200% and has allowed Corning's users to search their products in new ways.

Red Dog Informatics
Company Overview
Red Dog Informatics is a global internet and information technology company and part of The Wyanoke Group. Red Dog specializes in medical education and publishing and has a variety of services including web design and maintenance, database development, and other IT solutions.

Challenges
Red Dog Informatics was rolling out a new site for one of their sister companies and they needed improved search functionality that would deliver relevant results, support metadata drilldown, and integrate with their site design.

LTech Solution
LTech's QuickStart for Google Search Appliance allowed Red Dog to build out a successful search system. LTech customized the included parametric search capabilities in Version 5 of the Google Search Appliance to support a more sophisticated hierarchical drill-down. In addition, LTech consulted with Red Dog on best-practices for structuring their web content for crawling and outputting of results.

Results
Endocrinetoday.com is now powered by the Google Search Appliance. User's enjoy sophisticated drill-down search functionality along with the simple power of relevant and speedy search. This solution is slated to be rolled out to more publication web sites in the future.