In this third installment of the Bazaarblog partner interview series, Matt Eichner, VP Marketing & Strategic Development at Endeca, shares his views on where the field of information access is heading, specifically within the e-commerce domain.  Endeca and Bazaarvoice share many customers in common and have partnered to bring social navigation functionality to market through out-of-the-box integration, so we were eager to pick Matt's brain about what the future has in store for Endeca. 

1.  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information.  As a B2B company that provides access to information, what is Endeca’s mission? 

Endeca’s mission is to inform – and influence – daily decision making.  This manifests itself in many ways across many different industries.  But the idea is that businesses are sitting on a wealth of information in a wide variety of formats that lives in different places.  If you can give people the ability to better explore, analyze and understand this information in a way that helps them make better decisions, the aggregate positive economic value of all these better decisions is mind-boggling. 

Take e-commerce as an example.  A consumer shows up on your website looking for a great digital camera for her 65 year old mother – they are at some stage of the buying decision process.  They aren’t just looking for a list of all the cameras you have.   They want information about those options that will help them figure out which one is the perfect match.  They may care about common things like brand, price or resolution, but they also may care about what features matter most to less tech savvy people like their mom.  This info may come from product catalogs, buyers guides and customer reviews.  The challenge is pulling it all together in a way that supports this unique buying decision…and making sure you do the same for all users: The amateur photographer…or the person looking for the best kids games for the Wii…or the shopper who literally has no idea what to get her 10 year old nephew for Christmas. Influencing a unique decision is worth 10’s or hundreds of dollars.  Influencing all of the unique decisions is worth 10s or even hundreds of millions of dollars when you think about the aggregate volume of commerce traffic.   

2.  I associate Endeca with search and “Guided Navigation”, but “discovery” has become a popular term in our industry over the last year.  Endeca released its Discovery Suite very recently, which includes a social navigation module.  How do you differentiate “discovery” from “guided search and navigation”? 

Search can be an effective tool for fact finding, if you know what you are looking for and how to ask for it.  Want to know how much a Wii costs…and if they actually have any in stock?  No problem, type “Wii” in the search box and voila.  But search is a poor tool for discovery, where you may not know exactly what is available and can’t ask for it precisely. Stores like Walmart.com have millions of SKUs.  How could anyone possibly know even a fraction of what might be available in a catalog that size? Shopping for your nephew and you want to know what are the hot toys this holiday season for 10 year old boys?  How would you describe that question?  Search isn’t going to help. 

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