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Bringing highly accurate and relevant search results to clients of the leading auction house in the blink of an eye
Innogy

Client

Christie's

Technologies Involved

Background

Improving performance of the search engine

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Christie's is one of the world's largest auction houses with a long history of trading large quantities of artworks, unique objects, and famous collections. ACTUM was brought on board to simplify and improve the Enterprise Search Engine, replace multiple legacy search engines, and migrate to a new solution. The new Search Engine brings consistent and relevant results that are delivered in the blink of an eye.

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The challenges

Due to the limited availability of documentation, the development team had to build up the functionalities by reverse engineering. The collaboration and tight communication with Christie's Stakeholders was key in ensuring building an optimal solution.

Moving to SaaS

The joint team faced several challenges such as slow performance, high costs, multiple systems to maintain, and legacy technologies. Christie's has migrated the logic to the SaaS model, significantly reducing the need to maintain applications and infrastructure.

Real time cooperation

Utilizing ACTUM's experience from agile delivery, the team was able to focus on the most valuable work items and gave the stakeholders immediate control over the product delivery at the same time.

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What have we created?

Results

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Now the search runs in Amazon Web Services serverless mode, free of license while ensuring high performance. Christie's legacy search engines are being gradually deprecated and replaced by ACTUM-built solutions. Currently, the engine is providing the experience for both internal and external users. The solution was implemented on Christie's Website search over lots,  auctionsand articles as well as for use in internal search dedicated to finding items and specifics of the artworks. Enterprise search is ready for use in other channels such as Mobile Apps and internal business intelligence apps.

10x faster

The new search solution is significantly faster than the legacy one. The experience of both internal users and website visitors improved vastly.

10% of the original costs

With the new search solution, the operational costs were decreased by 90%. These savings could be routed to another value stream.

Consistent data

In such an exclusive and time sensitive business, the data must be precise and consistent across all the systems. Delivering relevant results fast is imperative to make the best business decisions.

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