BHP Billiton Selects Endeca to Power New Collaborative Knowledge Base

LONDON, England, 19 October, 2005 – Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation®, search and analysis solutions announced this week that a global exploration team within BHP Billiton Petroleum Limited (NYSE: ADR), has selected the Endeca ProFindïƒ" search and navigation platform to power a new collaborative knowledge base.

The announcement was made from Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2005.

Deployed by Endeca partner Blue Fish Development Group (www.bluefishgroup.com), a consulting firm specializing in enterprise content management, the solution is designed for information access and sharing by BHP Billiton geoscientists across the globe. BHP BillitonÂ’s global team selected the Endeca platform after evaluating the relative merits of other search and navigation solutions.

BHP BillitonÂ’s petroleum geoscientists are tasked with finding and investigating potential energy reserves and play a key role in minimizing risks and costs associated with exploration, while maximizing the revenue potential of these resources.

In their pursuit, these teams generate and collect enormous amounts of information that is captured in a variety of ways, from videos and photos to Word documents and presentations to highly structured databases. Organizing this wealth of information – literally valued at tens of millions of dollars -- in a way that could be easily accessed and shared became a daunting challenge, and one that had a direct impact on costs.

"It costs tens of millions of dollars to drill a well, and drilling rigs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to operate. By sharing new best practices, lessons learned and relevant research, our geoscientists can better predict opportunities and risks associated with potential new reserves," said Sam Clayton, Knowledge Management Specialist, BHP Billiton Petroleum. "The Endeca/Blue Fish solution has been designed to allow us to share our knowledge more effectively."

The Endeca ProFind platform allows BHP BillitonÂ’s geoscientists to search and browse all multimedia files, seismic and geological data, MS Office documents and presentations and any other material related to their research through a single interface.

As opposed to a single, fixed taxonomy or hierarchy, the Endeca solution creates and exposes multiple paths to the same information – ensuring discovery of all relevant information and reducing the time and effort to explore and analyse multiple, related data sets.

In addition, the new search and navigation solution proactively shows BHP Billiton’s geoscientists all the ways that this varied information is characterized and related. This takes the guesswork out of how to best describe information – and form a search query – that will return the most desirable, comprehensive and relevant results.

"Many prospective search buyers spend a lot time and effort worrying about how a search engine finds relevant information, but comparatively little understanding how different approaches map to the actual searching behaviour of their users. In contrast, the BHP team came into the buying process with requirements around collaboration, understanding, and exploration – a much deeper connection of what their geoscientists were seeking and how they were looking for it." said Jim Baum, president and CEO. "The combination of our technology, Blue Fish’s content expertise and a thoughtful, innovative customer like BHP provided the foundation for a truly unique and successful solution."

Used on websites, intranets, extranets, and within corporate enterprises, Endeca ProFind is a next-generation information retrieval platform that combines highly advanced search with Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities to help people quickly and easily find the information most relevant to their unique needs. Endeca’s approach to information retrieval mimics the human discovery process by integrating the two most common means of finding information online -- searching and browsing – allowing people to continually adapt and hone their search based on their own determination of relevancy. Endeca ProFind’s robust and easily managed Content Spotlighting capabilities promote relevant content based on defined rules, such as user profile or workgroup, search terms, navigation options, and time of day or day of the week. This combination gives organizations the powerful and intuitive tools to maximize the value of internal and external information, regardless of source, structure or file type.

About Endeca
EndecaÂ’s award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. EndecaÂ’s customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Tesco, Comet, Littlewoods, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, CompUSA); financial services (Bank of America); manufacturing and distribution (IBM and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises, Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of their annual planning efforts. Attendees are responsible for more than $35 billion in IT spending for their respective companies, and rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/us/symposiumorlando.


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Endeca, Endeca InFront, Endeca Navigation Engine, and Guided Navigation are registered trademarks, and Endeca ProFind and Endeca Latitude are trademarks of Endeca Technologies, Inc. All other product and service names mentioned herein are or may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies or organizations.


Contacts:
In USA - Craig VerColen
Endeca
617-577-7999
cvercolen@endeca.com

In UK - Paul Calderwood
Kingswood Public Relations
020 8763 2241
kingswoodmktg@btinternet.com