Pool Corporation Implements Exalead CloudView to Improve Customer Experience

Exalead, a global leader of information access solutions and search-based applications for the enterprise and on the web, today announced PoolCorp ("POOL") (NASDAQ/GSM: POOL), the world’s largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool and related backyard products, has deployed Exalead CloudView for its pool360 ecommerce website.

In 2009, PoolCorp evaluated its existing e-commerce platform and decided that a complete ground-up rewrite was needed to improve the ability for their customers to find products easier and faster. PoolCorp has always provided value-added tools for its dealers to grow their businesses and saw this as an opportunity to combine the best features of all of those tools into a new solution that would address all of the current customer adoption obstacles. With 35% of all customer feedback surrounding search and search related funtions, it was clear that in order for the new e-commerce site to provide an industry-leading customer purchase experience, an enterprise search solution was required.

PoolCorp reviewed a number of enterprise search solutions including Microsoft FAST, Endeca, Autonomy and open source Solr. PoolCorp chose Exalead because it was cost effective, scalable and much easier to install than competing products.

"Great software like Exalead is like a ball of clay. You can easily push and mold it into how you need to use it,” Dustin Hughes, Senior Software Architect of PoolCorp. “We had an extremely tight timeline for installing this software – due in part to Exalead’s fantastic customer support we got our beta up and working within weeks and rolled out to 500+ customers within 2 months. The entire system became generally available to 30,000+ U.S. customers within 4 months of the start of development and initial customer feedback has been very positive"

Since the pool360 beta test in July 2010, PoolCorp found:

• The Exalead-based system offered remarkable response times, often within 1/50th of a second even when the application was pulling information directly from PoolCorp’s existing ERP system.
• Exalead’s ability to compress data from its original SQL format resulted in a 10:1 compression reduction, significantly reducing the amount of hardware necessary to deploy the pool360 solution. 
• PoolCorp saved more than $30,000 in hardware costs and licensing fees over alternative SQL-based solutions.
• Their Exalead technology would be ideal system for an internal enterprise search system and Poolcorp will evaluate this as a way to improve PoolCorp’s staff productivity.
  

"Anybody who has worked with other enterprise search vendors knows exactly how remarkable Exalead CloudView is," said Paul Doscher, CEO of Exalead in the US. "Exalead provides unparalleled ease of use, ROI and scalability."