Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- MarkLogic
Tech Stack
- Lucene
- MarkLogic
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Search & Rescue
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
The American Psychological Association (APA) is a major academic publisher of journals and books. Founded in 1892, APA's primary objective has been the exchange of scientific information. The APA has 150,000 members and 54 divisions in the subfields of psychology. The Office of Publications and Databases, a major division of the APA, publishes an array of scholarly journals, dozens of books annually, and several academic databases including PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES. The APA's website gets more than one million hits a day, making it the premier provider of information in the discipline of psychology.
The Challenge
The American Psychological Association (APA) was facing challenges with its existing search engine, Lucene. The search response times were inconsistent, leading to a poor user experience. Moreover, the delivery of content to APA users was slow, taking up to 48 hours to prepare, deliver, and post content on APA websites. This was unacceptable as APA is the authoritative source for this content, and timely online availability is crucial to the authors, readers, and business partners who depend on it.
The Solution
APA replaced Lucene with MarkLogic to speed up content delivery and search results. Early proofs of concept showed MarkLogic would quickly alleviate APA’s pain points. Query speeds consistently hit under one second in testing. Less than 4 months later, APA had completely moved search from Lucene to MarkLogic with no downtime. Customers are already praising the faster response times. Index maintenance is now a small portion of one person’s job which has freed up two developers to focus on new features and performance improvements instead of keeping up a legacy system. That enabled the team to add spell suggest and typeahead features just a few weeks after deploying the search. The APA also was also able to reduce the server count from ten to three.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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