Lenovo is the number one PC manufacturer in the world, but that’s just the beginning of its product offerings. It’s also the number one provider of supercomputers, it sells phones, it provides large data center solutions, and sells transformational Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. With B2C and B2B business spanning over 180 markets in more than 60 different languages, Lenovo’s customer base is as diverse as the products.
So what leads a graphic designer in London to the exact ThinkPad laptop she needs? How does a business in North Carolina find the right infrastructure to support its internal systems? No matter what language the customer is using or what they’re saying, search is the universal language.
When Global Search Lead Marc Desormeau took over the search team for Lenovo.com, he was confronted with a question, “Why is search not optimizing as much as we want it to?”
“We index half a million records every 12 hours. Everything from data feed and product information, pricing, catalogs, things we sell. We also index information about jobs at Lenovo, about our environmental policies, our technologies, and customer use cases so it’s quite the range. It’s a pretty broad mandate to support Lenovo.com,” said Desormeau.
Just prior to Desormeau joining the team, Lenovo had set out to replace the current search engine, a FAST-based solution that was quickly sunsetting. Reaching out to Gartner and Forrester for vetted possibilities, the search team learned about Lucidworks Fusion as an option. During an 18-month extended RFP process, multiple vendors were assessed. Meanwhile, the mandate of the desired search engine shifted from simple transactional support to enacting a full digital transformation at Lenovo.
“Ultimately based on Lucidworks’ vision around AI, their future plans for machine learning and more sophisticated search implementations, and really looking for a search platform that can take us into the future, the decision was made to move to Lucidworks Fusion.”
Fusion, built with open source Apache Solr and Apache Spark, changed Lenovo’s search experience. Fusion’s out-of-the-box tools allow flexibility and customization so results can be tailored specifically to a product line, location, language, user, and more.
As the new, flexible search platform proved it could be leveraged to help meet different departments’ goals, the Lenovo community became more engaged with search.