The MarkLogic Excellence Awards are given each year to organizations that excel at utilizing the power of MarkLogic to solve challenges and business problems. As our customer base grows, the task of choosing the winners gets increasingly difficult.
This year, we’ve selected five organizations that have built out applications that have allowed us all to reimagine the impossible as possible. They’ve all succeeded at creating and deploying applications that transform their business or the way in which we think about data.
Wiley
Wiley is one of the world’s oldest and largest global publishers. They have used MarkLogic to store their content for over a decade. They store over 18 Million documents in MarkLogic in their XML Content Store, and use the MarkLogic platform to power four parts of their business: the Wiley Online Library, the Wiley Custom Select, Wiley Delivery & Syndication Service, and Cochrane Search Service. Building out and deploying these transformational systems over the past 9 years is an enormous and award-worthy accomplishment. However, it was for a project that went live in early 2013 that we recognize the amazing developers and IT team at Wiley.
In late 2012, Wiley formed a partnership with the American Geophysical Union. In less than 4 months the team was tasked with building out a system to support the partnership that required many changes to their business workflows, ingestion and slicing of the AGU content, and creation of the applications that would give AGU customers and members access to their rich content. An enormous task or as Freddie Quek, Director of Strategic Initiatives calls it “a Mission Impossible.” The team at Wiley made the impossible possible, by using MarkLogic as their core enabling technology.
Spurred by their success, I’m sure that the Wiley team will continue to amaze us with more agile Mission Impossible projects in the years to come. I can hardly wait to see what comes next!
American Psychological Association (APA)
In the past year, many people across MarkLogic have recognized the unique work the APA team has delivered to improve the user experience of the PsycNET application — in particular, fine tuning the search experience for their clients to ensure they find the most relevant information. APA’s product is critically important to the psychology community, enabling fast and easy search of journals, articles and other documents.
The APA has also been active members of the MarkLogic user community. The MarkLogic product team values the feedback and insight we get from our customers as it guides us to deliver the best product possible. We strive to listen closely to the needs of our users, and continue to deliver new, innovative, and ever more advanced features. During the Early Access program for MarkLogic 7, the APA team provided much appreciated insight into how the new Semantics offering could be used to help users find more contextually relevant information. And, if you attended one of the Fall 2013 Summit events, you would have seen some examples of how APA used semantics to be able to gain more context from their data.
We look forward to continued collaboration with the APA team, as we know that their suggestions and feedback benefit the whole user community.
Deutsche Bank
Data consolidation, schema re-writes and ETL processes are really hard. Over the past year, we’ve seen more and more of our customers use MarkLogic’s schema-agnostic database to consolidate data from many sources of structured data. Pulling together data from many disparate systems into one system that could be used for both transactional applications and analytic applications creates what we call the Data Centered Data Center.
Deutsche Bank was one of the first of our customers to embrace this idea, and in a very short period of time they were able to demonstrate the power of this type of data management solution.
With MarkLogic, the team at Deutsche Bank was able to achieve project success – they were able to rationalize their data, create a single view, and ensure data consistency. This was a challenge that they tried to complete with traditional relational technology, but the constantly changing data sources and formats impeded success.
In putting data at the center of their data center and bringing the applications to the data (instead of moving massive amounts of data around to the applications), Deutsche Bank has lessened the complexity, cost and risk of data management.
Zynx Health
With increasing demand to make better use of data to improve patient care, hospitals and healthcare organizations seek out new and innovative solutions. This past year, Zynx Health introduced Knowledge Analyzer, an application that integrates robust clinical decision support into traditional patient care processes. With evidence-based information at their fingertips, healthcare providers are able to make better-informed decisions and positively impact care.
The team building out this application at Zynx Health innovated not only with their application, but also in the way they manage their backend systems. The team created a platform to enable easy deployment of product builds to support their Agile development processes. By simplifying the management of their systems, they are able to reimagine the timeliness with which they can introduce new products and features – ensuring they can keep up with the fast pace of change within healthcare.
University of Virginia Press
When we think of Big Data, it is not often that we think of data created in the 1700’s. But that is exactly what the team at the University of Virginia Press was working with when they collaborated with the National Archives to produce Founders Online. http://founders.archives.gov/
To fulfill the mission of Open Government, the Founders Online application pulls together nearly 150,000 historical documents from the Founding Fathers of the United States: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. In pulling together correspondence and documents written by and written to these shapers of the US, the Founders Online site enables researchers, students and historians the ability to freely access and search the original thoughts and ideas, and see what went into creating our democracy.
These documents and writings would otherwise be inaccessible to most people, but pulled together in the online application, the information is available and accessible for new discoveries. As more documents are added to the application, it will continue to enrich the site making our history more accessible. Congratulations to David Sewell and the whole team on a momentous achievement.
David Leeming, Royal Society of Chemistry
Each year, we present an award to an individual for the work they do to support the MarkLogic community. This year, we presented the Lindblad Award to David Leeming from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
David has been instrumental in helping us grow awareness of Enterprise NoSQL in the United Kingdom and abroad. He routinely makes his time available to speak to other professionals about how MarkLogic and NoSQL has helped the Royal Society of Chemistry innovate quickly and build new and exciting applications based on their rich chemistry data.
As a chemist myself, I truly appreciate all of the applications and tools you put out in the market for chemists of all ages. (Sadly, the only chemistry I do anymore is in my kitchen.) I think back to my days of carrying around those heavy and bulky chemistry textbooks and references and can only imagine how much more productive students are today because of the applications built by the RSC.
Congratulations to David and thank you from the whole MarkLogic community for sharing your ideas and insights.