Elasticsearch

Genesys Cloud users expect to find people, documents, contacts, and other items easily and immediately. Genesys Cloud uses Elasticsearch to help users find information throughout Genesys Cloud. Genesys Cloud chose Elasticsearch as its search platform because Elasticsearch was designed specifically for cloud-based solutions. Elasticsearch is a well-tested technology that provides scalability, resiliency, and high availability for very large systems. 

Powerful searching reveals unexpected relationships

Genesys Cloud allows customers to decide what information they want to track and how they want to track it by providing customizable fields throughout Collaborate. Our dynamic Elasticsearch capabilities allow users to search on these fields. Because Elasticsearch allows any type of document or data item to be indexed for discovery, it is a surprisingly powerful relationship-finding system. For example:

  • Users can upload any type of file to their Documents repository. When users uploads documents, they can assign free-form tags to them. Elasticsearch uses these tags to find related documents.
  • Throughout Genesys Cloud, the type-ahead feature assists users as they complete fields. Wherever a suggested value automatically appears, Elasticsearch is working.
  • Users can search on biographical info that allows them to establish connections that they never had before, whether it’s a skill, hobby, or common university that they attended.
  • Developers can connect to our search API. We support type-ahead suggestions, facets, counts, and more. It’s all part of our platform API. For more information, see Platform API.

Elasticsearch provides thorough analysis for large, distributed systems

Documents are analyzed… 

When a document is sent to Elasticsearch, it analyzes the document: 

  • Text is tokenized: terms are created for the text that can be discovered
  • Terms are normalized to improve discovery: unnecessary words are removed and variants of words are added

… and indexed

When a document is analyzed, its associated index is immediately updated to contain the metadata about the document. Each index is then replicated across multiple distributed systems.

Genesys Cloud is a dynamic environment in which users are constantly adding new data, and our search capabilities must also allow users to search that new data. Elasticsearch allows us to continually update our search indices. Regardless of how large an organization becomes, or how often data is added, our users can use our search capabilities to find what they need.

Built-in recovery ensures high availability

Elasticsearch’s architecture enables a high level of search performance and availability. As a cloud-based solution, Elasticsearch is designed to work in a distributed architecture where data exists in multiple data centers. Elasticsearch is designed to recover from failure gracefully; the system has several options for recovering from an error state without impacting users. 

Elasticsearch is an open source search engine built on Apache Lucene, the industry-standard Java-based search engine. Through our extensive use and customization of Elasticsearch, we’ve developed a highly customized solution that provides rich search capabilities for the Genesys Cloud platform. Our search solution builds upon the sustainable automation strategies that we have built into the Genesys Cloud platform.

Why not Amazon?

Genesys Cloud uses Amazon Web Services for its global infrastructure. Although Amazon offers CloudSearch and Elasticsearch as managed services, the vast majority of Genesys Cloud search uses our customized Elasticsearch capabilities for several reasons: 

  1. We want to control our search capabilities, including our own plugins and customizations.
  2. We need to be HIPAA compliant (and neither of Amazon’s offerings are).
  3. We want to leverage new features and capabilities of Elasticsearch as they become available.

Because Genesys Cloud has its own search solution, we can continue to refine and improve it as new content and new features become available, enabling us to fulfill our commitment to remain on the cutting edge of search capabilities.