Announcing BA Insight Integration with Amazon Kendra
Sean Coleman, CTO and Chief Customer Officer
As many of you know, here at BA Insight we have a multi-platform strategy that supports many different search engines. This includes support for Azure Cognitive Search, Elasticsearch, SharePoint Online, and Solr. Recently, one of our largest customers decided to move from SharePoint Online to Elasticsearch, as SharePoint Online no longer met the needs of the organization. As a result of our strategy, they were able to seamlessly switch from one search engine to another. This meant that they could easily pivot to take advantage of the best search engine for their needs and deliver great search experiences, all while still retaining that flexibility and choice around the search engine that works best for them.
Although we have not officially made an announcement, late last year we began working with Amazon Web Services to support and integrate their intelligent search service, Kendra, with our software portfolio. Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and intelligent search service powered by machine learning. It quickly delivers relevant answers to users’ questions by extracting the specific answers they are looking for – all without any training. Users still get the search result pages, with supporting information, but the answers to the questions are provided at the top. Our tests have shown that the accuracy is more than 90%.
The combination of Amazon Kendra and BA Insight software makes it possible to:
Connect Kendra to a host of different content sources and get fast answers for your users
Explore inside documents stored in the Kendra index using Smart Previews
Complement answers from Kendra by taking advantage of natural language queries to provide answers to questions that cannot be extracted from the document body
Integrate Kendra with web-like search experiences
Deliver personalized, relevant, and related information on top of Kendra’s natural language questions and simple keyword search
Combine Kendra with other search engines to create a single unified search experience
Here are some real-world examples of how quickly getting the right answers to employees and customers can substantially improve responsiveness and efficiencies:
Your employees/colleagues log into your intranet and ask a question about company holidays. BA Insight for Amazon Kendra returns the exact answers based on their geographical locations. For example, if they are in the US, then it will show US holidays. If they are based in the UK, then the answers will relate to UK holidays. In addition, supporting documents will be returned explaining how to book leave or the actual booking form – again, all localized to the users.
You quickly need to find out how much of a discount customer #1 was provided, so you simply type “how much discount did we give to customer #1?” Again, the correct answer is displayed at the top of the page along with the last order the customer placed (from the purchase order system), the customer contact details (from a CRM system like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics), plus any historical emails relating to the account (from Outlook).
Your customers log into your customer portal and ask product and/or service-related questions. They no longer get a link to a Wiki or FAQ, where they will no doubt need to dig around to find information. Instead, they get specific answers to their questions. The beauty of this is that it does not matter if the answers are in a marketing document, an FAQ, or within product documentation – it will all be searched, and the relevant answers are automatically extracted and returned.
Your website visitors are looking for details on your service and need to know if your service supports mobile devices. They simply ask, “Does product xyz support mobile devices?” within your website search box and are provided the exact answer that “iPhone and Android” are both supported for the product. In this example, the actual answer was buried in the product data sheet, five clicks away from where the user was. No FAQ was written, no special tagging was done on the content, and no configuration was required from your web admins. They simply posted the data sheet and were done. This potential customer is now one step closer to converting.
We Have Made Search "Actionable" Massood Zarrabian, Chief Executive Officer
Recently we acquired the AppBus Hyperautomation Platform. It is a hybrid automation and integration platform, and at a high level it brings the best of MuleSoft and UiPath into a single platform. It can work with all types of systems. Open systems with lots of APIs, semi-open with some APIs, and even closed systems with no APIs. It can actually generate APIs based on the OpenAPI standard.
So, you may wonder why an organization focused on search would acquire AppBus? It is because we feel strongly that search in general, such as customer portals and enterprise search, can be a lot more useful and sticky with automation.
Let me use the world wide web as an example:
It is connected. Let’s say you are researching televisions. You go to Google, type in "TV", and get results from many sources such as from Amazon, Sony, LG, Samsung, and Best Buy.
It is relevant. The results on the first page are relevant and accurate and you can further refine. If you went to Amazon, there will be filters to further define the type of TV you want to buy. Price, brand, size, type- all of which let you get there and find what you are looking for.
It is always available. You can search anytime, from anywhere, from any device.
We have spent years and invested millions of dollars helping our customers provide the experiences we are so used to on the web. Many of our customers deploy our SmartHub and ConnectivityHub products, bringing the web into the enterprise. Many refer to the experience as "Google-like".
So, our technology finds information rapidly, assures relevant items are on the first page, personalizes the results, and gives users the tools to refine and get to the results they want faster. But at the end of it, enterprise search is just not actionable. Once you find the information, you need to go to the source system to do even the simplest tasks.
As mentioned earlier, web search is actionable, and we are aiming to advance enterprise search to be actionable too. The AppBus platform helps us and our customers to develop microservices, which we call SmartAutomation. It automates tasks within one system or between systems. This provides “connected” employee experiences, and the same can be done with customer-facing portals, regardless of where the data or systems reside. SmartAutomation enables the completion of any task, simple or complex, with a click of a button — all without leaving search. Some examples of what we and/or our customers have developed are:
Ability to upload files or change metadata in SharePoint, iManage, NetDocuments, and OpenText from the search interface
Ability to create and comment on Salesforce chatter conversations found via search
Ability to create and send invoices, project reports, and more directly from search-enabled dashboards
Ability to simulate user access to the search system to validate performance and availability
Circling back to the platform, it has a number of core capabilities such as:
Out-of-the-box automations and integrations to key business applications
The ability to easily create automations and integrations with our drag and drop design studio
The completion of any task, simple or complex, with a click of a button, without leaving search
Leverage and move data between source systems
Management of sophisticated workflow scenarios
I appreciate any thoughts or feedback you may have and would be happy to set up 30 minutes for a technology presentation. Reach out at mzarrabian@BAinsight.com
Feature Tip - SmartHub as a SharePoint Online Modern Web Part Sean Coleman, CTO and Chief Customer Officer
I’m excited to announce a new capability of our SmartHub product, driven directly out of feedback and suggestions from our customer community! We have enhanced SmartHub to allow for integration via a modern SPFx component, which can be added to SharePoint Online to create a seamless integration between SmartHub and modern SharePoint Online. Through this integration you can gain complete control of the search experience in SharePoint Online and add a host of capabilities powered by SmartHub, all of which will enable you to provide a transformative search experience to your users. Read more about it here.
Digital Transformation and Microservices: Focus on the Strategy
Sean Coleman, CTO and Chief Customer Officer
During my regular industry reading, I noticed that Digital Transformation continues to be a hot button keyword that many tech companies are generating content around. One particular article caught my eye, calling out microservices and its importance in Digital Transformation for 2021. At first I was excited because Microservices are of particular interest to me, and getting them more love is great. But… as I read more, I got frustrated.
Before I explain why, let me step back and share some history on Digital Transformation, because the marketing hype surrounding the term has been re-shaped to focus on technology, which to me, misses the true point. Brent Heslop of The Network Effect does a tremendous job laying out the history of Digital Transformation and pairs it with a fantastic infographic. Take a few minutes and check it out if you haven’t already: A Brief History of Digital Transformation – The Network Effect (supplychainbeyond.com). Pay special attention to his callouts in the 2015-2016 realm, and the articles from MIT and Deloitte, coupled with Forrester’s findings in 2016.
Webinar: Increasing Law Firm Efficiency with Modern Enterprise Search
We recently partnered with NetDocuments for an interactive discussion about how lawyers and staff can stop "reinventing the wheel" by uniting documents and information under a single search platform- saving valuable time and money.
