SAN ANTONIO, TX – Kitchener-based intranet solution provider Igloo launches a partnership with California’s Lucidworks to “augment search capabilities with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing.”
A Sept. 12 press release said that the technology provided by Lucidworks, a company that helps build search-driven solutions, will help Igloo customers searching for content, in their workspace hub, at a faster and more accurate pace “by finding correlations across human, machine, and application generated data in real-time and at scale.”
The platform will be part of Igloo’s digital workplace platform, a software-as-a-service, which is delivered as an intranet solution to improve workplace productivity and engagement.
The announcement was introduced during the keynote speech delivered at Igloo’s ICE conference to close to 400 participants in San Antonio, TX.
Grant Ingersoll, CTO at Lucidworks, said to the audience that most applications that employees use are failing because “they don’t account for what users care about” when they are searching for something.
Lucidworks’ AI-powered software learns what users want and personalizes their searches, he said.
“Search is the new database,” Ingersoll said. “We want to help you scale and get to the point of your answers…let’s go straight to the thing you want to do instead of having 10 blue links.”
Dan Latendre, CEO of Igloo, said in the press release that the team’s partnership with Lucidworks helps their company “deliver a new standard for an intelligent search experience for our customers – one suited to exceed the requirements of today and beyond.”
“By integrating Lucidworks technology into our digital workplace platform, customers will have access to a powerful search engine for the discovery of both corporate knowledge assets as well as people,” Latendre said.
Igloo’s intranet platform is also expanding globally and has introduced a way to organize intranet hubs for large firms that have regional offices and central headquarters that need to be connected.
Igloo’s clients range from small-to-medium sized businesses to large enterprises comprising of 100,000 employees. Latendre explained at an interview after the keynote that Igloo’s “sweet spot” is catering client experiences at companies that have one to 5,000 employees.
“So how do you scale that? That’s why we launched the Networked Enterprises, that’s how you scale to the larger enterprises,” he said, adding that Igloo has now partnered to launch Networked Enterprises with Caesars Entertainment Corporation, an American gaming corporation that operates over 50 casinos, hotels, and seven golf courses.
“Now what we can do is they have a corporate hub and they launch one hub. It becomes one to 5,000 deployments, but we do it 60 times,” Latendre said.
So if a company, like Caesars, has businesses in different locations, it can have an intranet hub for every location, but still be connected to the main corporate hub.
“If you think about companies that are geographically and culturally separated like Europe, Asia, a lot of these companies want a digital destination with their own language…[so the networked enterprises] provides that autonomy, but they’re still connected,” he said.
Both products are now available to all Igloo customers.
