Unified Access Case Study: Bel Groupe Gets the Whole Cheese with Exalead

This IDC Flash demonstrates the unified information access capabilities of Exalead - exalead one:enterprise ? which, when coupled with a well-defined information architecture, enable Bel Groupe employees to rapidly retrieve content across multiple repositories. It takes more than simple links to integrate disparate information sources. Bel Groupe, an international cheese maker, launched its corporate intranet by connecting more than 40 IBM Lotus Domino and relational databases from its marketing, R&D, and human resources departments. The company quickly discovered that simply linking multiple repositories, many of which were initially designed for specific purposes, raised a host of issues. While employees might connect to one document collection or another, they could not easily find what they wanted. What they needed was a unified search environment a single access point that can distribute a query to several sources, no matter the type of query format, and then make sense of the different kinds of results that are returned. Bel's information technology (IT) group solved this problem by developing an integrated information architecture for querying multiple sources and by deploying a search engine from Exalead to provide a unified search experience across its intranet. The IT group identified the metadata and keywords within each repository that needed to be modeled and mapped into Exalead.