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WCC SERVICES UTILIZES GRID IN ELISE 5.1 MATCHING TECHNOLOGY

WCC Services, a company specializing in business-critical matching software, announced the latest version of its flagship product, ELISE 5.1. The new release delivers more meaningful match results by improving accuracy while maintaining ELISE's sub-second response time. In addition, WCC has included new management tools that streamline ELISE's integration into heterogeneous environments, and offer in-depth data analysis capabilities.

ELISE is a high-performance matching system that enables businesses and their customers worldwide to find the most meaningful information. Searching vast amounts of data, ELISE delivers ranked results with unrivalled speed, accuracy and reliability. The product is used primarily in the staffing, e-commerce and security industries to find the people, products or services that best match the user's requirements.

"Traditional key word searches and database queries struggle to deliver relevant results when searching large volumes of data," said Peter Went, CEO of WCC Services. "ELISE 5.1 applies human rules to the search process so it quickly delivers the best possible match, regardless of the volume of data. Unlike traditional searches, ELISE finds what you want, not simply what you asked for."

Meaningful Matches

The key to ELISE's superior matching is its use of "fuzzy logic," which supersedes keyword searching to provide more accurate match results. Fuzzy logic encompasses user input such as weighted criteria and gliding scales in combination with either uni-directional or bi-directional matching capabilities. By considering that some criteria may be more important to the user than others, the product can deliver more relevant hits that are ranked from best fit to least.

While most searches only require a uni-directional match, meaning the match fits the user's criteria only, in some circumstances, bi-directional matching can be important. ELISE's bi-directional match capability can be applied to specific environments, such as staffing and dating where the criteria of both parties are equally important when considering the quality of the match. Bi-directional matching ensures that both candidate and employer, for example, are mutually interested.

Speed And Performance

ELISE can search millions of records and return meaningful, ranked results in sub-second response times, making it one of the fastest matching systems available today. To deliver this kind of performance, ELISE uses Grid techniques that make optimal use of industry-standard hardware. These Grid techniques also enhance ELISE's impressive scalability, and facilitate high-availability of the product by distributing software components redundantly over multiple servers or even across data centers. Customers typically use ELISE in very large scale environments, holding millions of objects and executing hundreds of match requests per second on that data. It is not uncommon for ELISE to handle tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Analysis And Integration Tools

ELISE 5.1 includes trace manager and data analyzer components that bring advanced usage statistics and reporting capabilities. These components provide insight into customers' behavior (e.g., what are the most common queries, most popular features, what information is most often sought after and not found, what do the fastest & slowest queries look like, etc.).

Whether a solution has gone live or is in development, insight into the actual usage of the system is needed for various reasons. For instance, knowledge about which functions are used most often provides information about potential transaction and performance issues.

The ELISE 5.1 data replicator component provides seamless integration of the ELISE search database with RDBMS systems (Oracle, SQL server, Sybase, DB2, etc.). The data replicator includes real-time data replication support. As data changes in the RDBMS, essential objects become immediately available in ELISE without requiring index-rebuild procedures.

"To exploit visionary search capabilities, enterprises should select products with robust functions to examine semantic structures in corpora (that is, the total sum of content that a search engine is expected to index and provide searchability to) and in queries, as well as flexible architectures and new ways of improving or displaying relevance." Gartner, "Knowledge Workplace Magic Quadrant Reveal Important Trends," T. Bell et al., May 2004.