Argus Media & CloudSearch

Chris Fosberry, CTO

Argus Media

About Argus

• Leading international and independent price reporting organisation

• Founded in 1970 — over 40 years experience

• Today over 120 publications and services

• Almost 500 employees and 40 freelancers (news journalists)

• Customers in 110 countries

• Annual revenues ~£100mn (2013)

• London HQ. Nineteen offices around the globe

• One of top 50 fastest growing UK registered companies

(Sunday Times)

The problem we had

• Over the past 40 years, Argus has accumulated a wealth of content including; • 75,000 Historic publications stored across multiple file systems

• 400,000 News Stories

• 16,500 Commodity prices of which many update daily

• Search was very slow and in some cases results could take over a minute to appear

• User experience was very basic with no support for faceted search or synonyms. Often users could not locate what they were looking for

• As new data sources were acquired it was time consuming to make this content available to Argus customers

Why we chose Amazon CloudSearch

• Amazon model allowed a proof of concept to be delivered

quickly

• Amazon has a reputation for releasing new features regularly

• No need to consider infrastructure requirements

• Resilience supported through hosting across multiple

availability zones

• Scaling happens seamlessly as user demand increases

• Pricing model based on usage

Implementation Experience

Negative Positives

Not having to worry about environment construction and

configuration has undoubtedly saved us hundreds of man

hours in systems administration activity

• Amazon provided support where

required

• Documentation provided is very

good

• Implementation against the API was

relatively painless

• No stability concerns raised to date

• Some search requests would fail

validation checks for unknown

reasons. Whilst the reasons were

valid, the detail returned by the

search service was not always

helpful

Current Status & Business Benefits

• Amazon CloudSearch is now live across Argus premium online channels

• Customer feedback has been extremely positive with particular focus on performance and the use of faceted search • The queries that took over a minute to

execute are now sub 1 second

• Staff who have access to all content believe they are working more efficiently