Case Study – USITC
Exalead helps the USITC in its mission
to deliver a harmonized tariff schedule
and balance the global marketplace
The United States International Trade Commission is an independent, quasi-judicial
Federal agency with broad investigative responsibilities on matters of trade. The
mission of the USITC is to administer U.S. trade remedy laws within its mandate in a
fair and objective manner; provide the President, USTR, and Congress with independent analysis information, and support on matters of tariffs, international trade, and
U.S. competiveness; and maintain the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United
States (HTS).
Search was not FAST enough
USITC first installed Microsoft FAST in 2005 to provide a web search capability for
http://www.usitc.gov. Over time, user satisfaction surveys indicated that visitors to
Organization
USITC
the site were not finding the documents for which they were looking and were
Industry
generally dissatisfied with their search results. In addition, the USITC technology
Federal Government
team found that FAST was difficult to manage, was not well supported, and was costly
to administer – requiring full time staff. By 2009, the agency realized it was time to
Challenge
replace FAST with newer, more manageable technology that would reduce adminis-
• Better search results
for site visitors
trative overhead, and improve customer satisfaction.
• Ease of use, maintenance
• Structured and unstructured
USITC turns to Exalead for Search
USITC evaluated an array of search technologies and providers to replace the FAST
system including Exalead, Google Enterprise Search Appliance, Vivisimo, and
Brainware. USITC determined that Exalead met all of their requirements, including
multi-platform support, and additionally, was easy to use and flexible without being
overly complex.
information
• Multi-platform requirement
Solution
• Exalead search platform
Results
• Improved customer
“We selected Exalead for a number of reasons. Our production systems run on
different platforms, some Windows and some Linux,” said Joel Moeller,
eBusiness Division Manager at USITC. “Exalead is much easier to configure and
maintain across different platforms and their customer services is exceptional
compared to what we experienced before.”
www.exalead.com
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satisfaction with search
• Reduced maintenance
overhead
• Improved support
Case Study – USITC
Come rain or come snow, Exalead prevails
USITC required Exalead for two separate business applications. First, Exalead was implemented as the search
mechanism for the public USITC website. With over 300GB of information collected in more than 40,000
assorted Word and WordPerfect documents, spreadsheets, PDF files and more being searched by up to 14,000
visitors per day, this was no small undertaking.
As it turns out, during the week when the new search engine was scheduled to go live, the Washington, D.C.
area experienced a hundred-year snowstorm that stranded people across the region.
According to Moeller, “The Exalead professional services team were stranded here with us and were
engaged in a heroic struggle with the elements to meet the needs of their customer. Because of their
efforts, we went live as planned. We’re not sure another vendor would have gone to those lengths.”
The second business application for Exalead was for internal use on multiple servers with multiple indexes on
different repositories of information. These were set up to address the disparate needs of various groups within
the agency.
Exalead delivers quick results
The entire search capability was deployed in less than three weeks by a single IT resource. Of course, other
resources were brought in to test the system before conversion, but the majority of the work was significantly
less than a person/month of effort. Within a week or two the results were in.
Says Moeller, “After switching to Exalead we started getting feedback from users almost immediately that the
search functionality on our site had greatly improved and information was easier to find.”
More to come
Since the deployment of Exalead went quickly and easily for USITC, they are considering expanding beyond the
two business cases they have operational today. Several possibilities include using Exalead with their SharePoint deployment, and a number of other internal use cases, including a possible integration with their Oraclebased document management system.
Contact us to discover for yourself why Exalead is the right search platform
to work with your structured and unstructured information.
Visit www.exalead.com to learn more.
About Exalead
Contact Us
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Exalead, S.A.
10, place de la Madeleine
75008 Paris
France
Tel: +33 (0)1 55 35 26 26
Fax: +33 (0)1 55 35 26 27
www.exalead.com
E.U. Headquarters, Paris, France - U.S. Headquarters, San Francisco, CA
Offices in 7 countries
250+ customers worldwide
Founded in 2000 by AltaVista executives
Exalead is a division of Dassault Systèmes, whose 9000 employees and 6000 partners provide 3D based applications,
PLM based applications, and Search based applications to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries.