Lucidworks Fusion 5.0 is here! Fusion’s cloud-native architecture is optimized for deployment on Docker and Kubernetes and enables dynamic scaling of AI-powered search applications. Fusion 5.0 also introduces native Python support and integrates with the most popular machine learning frameworks, so you can seamlessly deliver powerful experiences to your customers and employees.
Join Lucidworks Chief Architect, Tim Potter and Director of Product Marketing, Alea Abed for a tour of what’s new and improved in the latest release of Fusion.
Presented by: Tim Potter, Chief Architect, Lucidworks and Alea Abed, Director of Product Marketing, Lucidworks
4. Lucidworks helps the world’s
largest organizations make
their valuable data work for
their customers and
employees.
250+E M P L O Y E E S
400+E N G A G E M E N T S A C R O S S T H E
G L O B A L F O R T U N E 2 0 0 0
S P O N S O R I N G
C O M PA N Y
5. S A N F R A N C I S C O
United States
C A M B R I D G E
United Kingdom
B A N G A L O R E
India
H O N G K O N G
China
N O R T H C A R O L I N A
United States
9. C A S E S T U D Y
Better customer support
Putting the right information in front of customers in fewer clicks
Improved support calls
Shorter wait times, and a more engaged support
Reinvestment of savings
200%I N C R E A S E I N C T R
50KF E W E R S U P P O R T T I C K E T S
91%R E D U C T I O N I N T C O
12. C A S E S T U D Y
Uses Fusion to handle search
across multiple B2B, B2C, SMB &
private sites, across:
88 countries
36 languages
170%I N C R E A S E I N S E A R C H - B A S E D
R E V E N U E
142%I N C R E A S E I N C T R
Fortune 500
Computer & Electronics Retailer
13. Advanced connectors and AI enrichment,
delivered by intuitive applications created with App Studio,
deployed in the cloud or on-prem.
D ATA
Any format,
any platform
S O L U T I O N
Personalized
to meet needs of
each unique user
FUSION
Server
FUSION
Search AI
FUSION
App Studio
FUSION
Data AI
F U S I O N P L AT F O R M
Human
Generated
System
Generated
Application
Generated
Digital
Commerce
Applications
Digital
Workplace
Applications
15. What’s new in Fusion 5.0
• Cloud-native
• Kubernetes deployments (Cloud or on-prem)
• Autoscale capable
• Easier deployment, upgrades and management
• Native support for Python ML models
16. Data Science Toolkit Integration
• Increased data science productivity
• Faster time to value
• Extend ML across entire experience w/
Python integration at index and query
time
17. Lucidworks Predictive Merchandiser
• Visual interface to create and
manage rules
• Enables merchandisers to be
self-service
• Eliminates tedious workflows
18. F US IO N 5 .0 FO R THE
D IGITA L WO R K PLACE
• More more apps, more data
sources, faster
• Reduced risk of downtime
• Manage resources & costs
• Higher relevancy, ML-powered
results
19. 19
F US IO N 5 .0 FO R
DIGITA L CO MME RCE
• Scale resources for events like
Black Friday
• Reduce risk of downtime and
lost revenue
• Seamlessly improve product
relevance
• Give merchandisers more
control over search & browse
experience
21. Cloud-native Architecture
Flexible
deployment
Deploy on any
private or public
cloud infrastructure
Microservices
Orchestrated by
Kubernetes
Reduced
TCO
Easier management,
Less DevOps
specialization
required
Autoscaling
policies
Expand capacity
where needed to
adapt to changing
business needs
Continuous
Delivery
Reduced risk of
downtime
22. Kubernetes:
Beyond the Hype
• Best practices for operating distributed
systems baked into codified processes
and tools
• Better alignment with our customers’ goals
of running in the cloud and leveraging
microservices
• K8s ecosystem is growing fast!
• Installing + monitoring, scaling, complex,
HA distributed apps has never been easier
• Resource efficiency ~ less overhead
running containers, balanced pod
allocation across clusters
23. Install / Upgrade via
Helm
• Package manager and template framework for Kubernetes
Apps
• Fusion 5 comes well-configured out-of-the-box via a Helm
Chart
• Add the Artifactory Helm repository:
helm repo add lucidworks https://charts.lucidworks.com
helm repo update
• Install Fusion cluster:
helm install --values default_fusion_values.yaml
-n f5 lucidworks/fusion
• Upgrade Fusion cluster:
helm upgrade --values default_fusion_values.yaml
f5 lucidworks/fusion
See: https://github.com/lucidworks/fusion-cloud-native
Today’s presenters are Tim Potter and Alea Abed
Tim is the Chief Architect here at Lucidworks, heading up our cloud engineering efforts. He is also an Apache Lucene/Solr committer. And Alea is the director of product marketing here at Lucidworks.
Thanks, Janessa.
Today we are going to talk to you about our latest release of Lucidworks Fusion. First, I’ll share a brief overview of Lucidworks for those of you who aren’t familiar, then talk through some of the new features in Fusion 5, and then Tim will dive a bit deeper into the technical details.
Lucidworks is a search and AI company, and we help the world’s largest organizations make their most valuable data work for their customers and employees.
We offer Lucidworks Fusion, a platform that hyper-personalizes digital experiences
We have just over 250 employees and more than 400 customer engagements across the Fortune 2000.
We have a major global presence, with support operations that cover every time zone. We’re headquartered in San Francisco, California with another major U.S. office in North Carolina, as well as global offices in the United Kingdom, India and Hong Kong.
In our over 400 deployments across the fortune 200, we’ve seen some themes arise. These probably wont surprise you… personalization is expected, an AI is a priority. In digital workplace, we’re seeing that consumer-like experiences are expected, and in commerce we’re seeing that many retailers are differentiating from Amazon in omnichannel experience. AI is what powers those personalized experiences.
So, we solve for that by providing hyper-personalized experiences to workers and shoppers.
We support these needs by hyper-personalizing employee and customer experiences. In the case of the digital workplace, Lucidworks Fusion uses AI and machine learning to give your customers, in the case of support portals, and employees – for enterprise search and discovery apps-- access to the information they need to take the next best action.
SCRIPT
Those customers chose Lucidworks Fusion because the hyper-personalized workplace experiences that it creates make employees more engaged and effective as they care for customers, conduct research, recruit talent, ensure compliance or detect fraud.
SCRIPT:
The open source Linux pioneer, Red Hat, uses Lucidworks for customer support.
With Fusion, they have:
Tripled their click-through rate,
avoided about 50,000 support tickets and
reduced their TCO by 91%, compared to their previous self-service portal.
REFERENCES:
Case Study: “How Red Hat Cut Costs and Improved Relevancy with Lucidworks Fusion” | http://programs.lucidworks.com/rs/579-JML-927/images/Lucidworks_Red_Hat_Case_Study.pdf
SCRIPT:
What if you could tailor the shopping experience to match each shopper’s wants and needs?
Lucidworks Fusion uses AI and machine learning to make online shopping experiences uniquely personal for each and every shopper.
These hyper-personalized shopping experiences improve KPIs like ,add-to-cart, average order value, and clickthrough rates.
Fusion’s integrated machine learning takes on some of the tedious things that merchandisers don’t enjoy doing (such as maintaining thousands of business rules), freeing merchandisers to focud more attention on the areas where human intelligence and creativity should not be replaced by algorithsm.– we’ll cover more on this later.
Here’s an example of a Fortune 500 retailer who uses Fusion to handle search across multiple B2B, b2c, SMB and private sites globally. Before Fusion they experienced challenges around zero-results searches, click-through rates, and personalization. In just one year of using Fusion, they were able to attribute a 170% increase in search-based revenue and a 142% increase in click-through rates. They have improved those metrics even further as they have implemented signals and other machine learning tools within Fusion.
In order to hyper-personalize digital experiences and support improved metrics in commerce and workplace apps, Lucidworks Fusion incorporates AI and Machine Learning (ML) throughout the platform to intelligently ingest, explore, and curate the data.
Fusion can ingest data of any type, from any data source – and uses AI on the ingest side to cluster, classify and organize content, then on the query side to understand intent and personalize results. App Studio is our application development framework that enables rapid development of front-end applications.
Lucidworks Fusion 5.0 lets customers easily deploy AI-powered data discovery and search applications in a
modern, containerized architecture with built-in support for rapidly building interactive dashboards and modern enterprise
applications. Customers can leverage existing models and workflows, or quickly create and deploy new ones using popular tools like Python ML, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and spaCy.
Enables merchandisers to be self-service
Eliminates the tedious workflows where merchandisers have to ask IT to create and manage rules
Visual interface to create rules to pin, boost, bury, block and hide specific products for a search term or category page
Like I said, Tim will dig a bit deeper into microservices– but from a business standpoint, these are some of the benefits of Fusion 5’s microservices architecture and new features.
Scale resources efficiently and schedule capacity for events like Black Friday
Reduce risk of downtime and lost revenue
Seamlessly improve product relevance with custom ML models
Give merchandisers more control over search & browse experience
Lucidworks Fusion 5.0 lets customers easily deploy AI-powered data discovery and search applications in a
modern, containerized architecture with built-in support for rapidly building interactive dashboards and modern enterprise
applications. Customers can leverage existing models and workflows, or quickly create and deploy new ones using popular tools like Python ML, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and spaCy.
Microservices allow Lucidworks to roll out updates quickly
Fusion 5 delivers consumer-like experiences to the digital workplace
Architected with Kubernetes to follow modern cloud architecture best practices.
Packaging via Helm and Spring Security and continuous zero-downtime upgrades.
Flexible deployment: Deployable on GCP, Azure and AWS
Fusion is the only platform which allows you to scale different search and index traffic without separate installations.
Customers only need one overall deployment and they can scale resources based on traffic type
Python models are supported natively
Fusion is the only platform which allows you to scale different search and index traffic without separate installations.
Data scientists can work within a familiar workflow – streamlining productivity.
Definition: Microservices are a software development technique that
structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, with these
advantages:
◦
Resilience
-
a failure in the code affects no more than one service or function
◦
Scalability
-
scale up a single function or service without having to scale the entire
application
◦
Flexibility
-
use the right tool for the right task, without getting tied down to one vendor
◦
Speed to market
-
make changes to a specific service, without rewriting the entire codebase
◦
Easier maintenance
-
smaller modules going through a CI process improves our ability to
deliver error-free applications
◦
Reduced TCO
-
multiple teams work on independent services, enabling you to deploy more
quickly
◦
Continuous delivery
-
code is continuously developed, tested and deployed, and you can use
code from existing libraries instead of reinventing the wheel
https://www.cio.com/article/3201193/7-reasons-to-switch-to-microservices-and-5-reasons-you-might-not-succeed.html
In previous versions of Fusion, ops teams had to consult Lucidworks on how to efficiently run Fusion in HA manner. Turn that problem on its head, now the Ops are baked in. Fusion engineering has already thought thru many of the scaling, resiliency concerns and baked those into the Fusion Helm chart
Problems are only getting harder
Bigger datasets
More apps
Faster churn
Smarter insights, hyper-personalization
Reduced friction, well-configured out-of-the-box
Minimize risks associated with making changes
Zero downtime for most updates