Customers

The Trix to Creating a {Total}ly New Customer Experience: Elastic @ General Mills

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Elastic{ON} Tour: Chicago was the first Elastic event that I had attended and I was extremely impressed with the quality of the event. From the ability to have one-on-one time with the Elastic engineers to the professional and prepared Elastic event staff to the venue; everything was really well done. Even more, it was great to learn about all of the up and coming (now Generally Available) features of the Elastic Stack v5.0 and I found the talk about pipeline aggregations and ingest nodes were particularly interesting and timely as we look to build out additions to our search platform.

At General Mills, Elasticsearch has proven to be a good choice as the engine powering our Index Content Delivery system for our core sites of BettyCrocker.com, Pillsbury.com, Tablespoon.com and Quericavida.com. It was great being able to tell the story of how we migrated from Endeca to Elasticsearch and highlight how our new Elastic-based core engine performs reliably, quickly, and most importantly in a way that provides us the framework to constantly improve our consumer experience.

For me, speaking at Elastic{ON} Tour: Chicago represented a great way to contribute back to the amazing Elastic community. Reflecting back, speaking was a fun experience, but the best part was afterward at the Ask Me Anything booth when I was approached by folks from various companies who were at the same crossroads I traveled a year ago and were looking to learn from our experiences. It was great to be able to give truly meaningful answers to their questions.

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Doug is part of the Precision Marketing Capabilities group at General Mills and has focused on the search technologies for such sites as BettyCrocker.com, Pillsbury.com and several others. Search is an extremely important part as how content is featured and accessed on these sites. Doug has always had an extreme interest in natural language processing and in driving a greater degree of relevancy to the results returned. As side from the interesting stuff at work, Doug is an avid motorcyclist and downhill skier. As liking things that go fast, Elastic was a perfect fit.