Prolifics UK integrates Retailer’s B2B e-Commerce Platform with Blazing Fast Search Engine

Business Challenge:
A UK High Street Retail Giant not only sells its goods to the general public but also to other companies, including UK franchises, international franchises and many smaller overseas customers who stock their products as part of their range.

Our hugely successful Retail Customer decided to grow the B2B arm of their business. In order to do so, they needed to not only expand their existing B2B e-Commerce system capacity but also to find a way to speed up the searching and indexing of their products on the system so that they could more quickly and accurately be made available to their Customers using the website.

Solution:
As part of the Apache Lucene project, Apache has developed Solr, which it describes as “a popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform”. Major features include “powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.” The Solr solution is “highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more.” And is claimed to power the search and navigation features of “many of the world's largest internet sites.”

Prolifics in partnership with IBM, assisted this High Street Retail Giant in successfully expanding their B2B e-Commerce solution by providing deep product expertise which enabled the Customer to grow their WebSphere Commerce infrastructure. Prolifics also architected and developed the infrastructure solution for the implementation of Apache's "Solr" Search & Indexing application to run on WebSphere Application Server and its integration with the Customer’s B2B e-Commerce platform . This Retail Customer is now armed with a flexible and blazing fast e-Commerce website to offer its new and existing B2B customers.

(Quoted reference: Apache website. Learn more about Apache Solr here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/)

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.