Go1 targets one billion online business learners with support from Elastic

Access to a vast library of content combined with a convenient distribution model has enabled Go1 to double in size every 12 months for the past few years. But such rapid growth forced the organization to regularly upgrade its technologies, including search, to keep pace with demand. "Replacing software tools is expensive and puts a heavy demand on our internal IT resources," says Ducrou. "We needed to find a more scalable search solution that could flex with the business."

The solution had to be especially agile to accommodate Go1's robust service. Go1 has 8 million users and 90,000 courses that comprise 9.8 million learning objects. When all the course objects undertaken by learners are added up, the total is 84 million events, known as enrollments. In addition, each customer has their own portal and can create a unique catalog of courses that may combine modules sourced from Go1's library with content developed in-house for highly customized experiences.

When it became clear that the previous search solution wasn’t flexible and scalable enough to handle the growth of Go1 data volumes, Ducrou researched the market and selected Elastic Enterprise Search as the best match.

Initially deployed on AWS, Go1 then migrated Elastic Enterprise Search to Elastic Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Elastic Enterprise Search now plays three key roles in the delivery of Go1's world-leading learning and education experience. First, it helps control access to learning courses. For instance, some companies restrict the number of courses available to employees so that they can more easily find topics that are most relevant to them. Second, Elastic supports Go1's main search function, enabling learning leaders and employees to quickly find and filter courses according to their specific search criteria. Last, Elastic provides sophisticated reporting capabilities that enable customers to track the assignment of courses and employee progress.

"Imagine trying to find everyone who has not completed their training, are at a certain learning level, and based out of a single office. Then include certain business unit names that have been added into Go1's system. That's an incredibly complicated report request, which Elastic supports," says Ducrou.

Managing such queries within a relational database environment would limit Go1's ability to make changes to multiple data tables and constrain its overall ability to aggregate and organize business-critical data. But with Elastic, which uses a nonrelational database, Go1 customers can make such requests using a visual query creator which returns a standard CSV file that can be converted to an editable spreadsheet for further customized reporting.

Says Ducrou, "We don't have to worry about how the data is stored, we just give our customers a tool to retrieve the information. Elastic's ability to deliver advanced, complex reporting adds enormous value to our service."

Ducrou sees a wider role for Elastic as Go1 closes in on its target of one billion users worldwide. This includes leveraging vector search, a form of machine learning used in semantic search that applies numerical associations to unstructured data, including text and images to better capture the meaning, context, and intent of queries to deliver more relevant results.

Vector search will also enhance the personalization of Go1's course recommendation feature. "If there's a mid-level employee who has ambitions to achieve a C-level role, we can show them the courses that helped others follow a similar career path," says Ducrou. According to Ducrou, the biggest benefit of Elastic to Go1 is the cutting-edge search technology it provides that makes life easier for the Go1 engineering team. With Elastic always available and operating in the cloud rather than on premise, the team has more time to focus on projects that add value to the business.