The Wait is Over; Elastic Announces 2019 Elastic Search Awards Honorees

For 2019, we expanded the Elastic Search Awards, formerly known as the Elastic Cause Awards, to recognize more than just those using the Elastic Stack for the betterment of humanity. We're also now celebrating organizations implementing something original or impossible ("I never would have thought of that use case") in addition to organizations who are transforming their business with Elastic's technology. The awards now fall into three categories: "Cause Awards," "Cluster Awards" (Technology Innovations), and "You know, for Search! Awards" (Business Transformation).

Two honorees were named for each category. The program's judges included Nancy Gohring, industry analyst for 451 Research; Tom Davis, Executive Director and CISO of Indiana University's OmniSoc; Rich Horace, DevOps director at Nativo and Elastic Los Angeles Meetup Group Community leader since 2015; Leah Sutton, Elastic's vice president of Human Resources; and Steve Kearns, Elastic vice president of Products.

Exceptional Elastic Stack Use Cases

Gohring expressed high praise for the applicants: "We considered award applications spanning a diverse range of public and private enterprise and novel use cases," said Gohring. "I was particularly intrigued by solutions that promise a positive impact on quality of life. Apparently, my fellow judges agreed, given that we ultimately included a healthcare-related application among the top two in each award category."

Shay Banon, chief executive officer and founder of Elastic, thanked all the applicants and the honorees for showcasing their "exceptional use of Elastic's technology for impacting social change and helping their organizations do the impossible with their data."

"The level of creativity, innovation, and change these users are driving for their organizations is amazing," Banon said. "We are continually humbled that our products play a part in it and hope that their work inspires others to use the Elastic Stack for good and to solve whatever complex problems arise in their organizations."

The results of the Elastic Search Awards for the Americas were officially announced at the Elastic{ON} Tour San Francisco on February 28, 2019.

And the honorees are...

Cause Awards:

Our judging panel reviewed the applicants based on a project's measurable impact, reach, and inspiration for bettering the world.

Guidestar by Candid
GuideStar by Candid helps people make better decisions about nonprofits and the work they do. GuideStar maintains online profiles on 2.7 million currently and formerly IRS-recognized nonprofits. The profiles are populated with information from the IRS, directly from nonprofits, and via other partners in the nonprofit sector.

The nonprofit's search engine, powered by Elasticsearch, is core to connecting people to the data to make informed decisions about the social sector. Elasticsearch helps power the mission to revolutionize philanthropy by providing searchable information that advances transparency, helps users to make better decisions and encourages charitable giving.

"We are honored to receive this award. We connect people to data that informs their decisions about the social sector. The Elastic Stack is integral to accomplishing this goal. Last year, more than 10 million people found nonprofit information through the GuideStar website, in our products and services, and on 200-plus websites and applications that use our data," said Shane T. Ward, senior director of technology at Guidestar by Candid.

NowPow
NowPow is a women-owned-and-led technology company that powers communities with the knowledge people need to get well, care for others, and manage life while living with disease. NowPow partners with health systems, health plans, and community-based organizations to conduct screenings, identify self-care needs, facilitate referrals, support bidirectional patient engagement, and document referral outcomes in the United States.

NowPow uses Elasticsearch as the foundation for their search and resource matching technology within its community-based resource directory.

"We are thrilled to be an Elastic Search Awards honoree. As a social impact technology company, NowPow works to connect patients to resources in order to empower them in self-care, and to make resource knowledge accessible to all," said Mike Wolf, head of technology at NowPow. "Elasticsearch is the core of our resource search technology and is integral to supporting our work across health systems and patient communities. "

Cluster Awards (Technology Innovation):

Our judging panel reviewed the applicants based on inspiration, uniqueness, and whether the project required a leap of faith that the Elastic Stack would be the engine that powered the successful solution.

SolveBio
SolveBio is at the intersection of technology and genomics. The startup describes its field as "precision medicine." SolveBio's team of designers, scientists, and engineers deliver solutions to large pharma companies enabling them to leverage large amounts of complex molecular data for exploratory research and clinical drug development.

The Elastic Stack is core to their enterprise molecular data platform, which provides customers with a secure space for semi-structured data from hundreds of sources. SolveBio's goal is to get the right data to the right people, across the vast multidisciplinary environment that is the global pharma enterprise to enable the surfacing of new biological insights necessary to discover and develop effective therapies.

"SolveBio is really excited to be a 2019 Elastic Search Awards honoree. We've considered ourselves Elasticsearch power users since 2014 and have been able to push the system to its limits," said David Caplan, the SolveBio chief technology officer and cofounder. "It is thanks to the Elastic Stack that we've been able to accomplish so much with such a small team working in the incredibly complex world of genomics."

Jet.com
Jet.com is an ecommerce company and subsidiary of Walmart. Elasticsearch has been greatly helping Jet.com match customers' textual queries with their inventory of products. They have successfully built an end-to-end Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system built on Elasticsearch.

With Elasticsearch, the company seamlessly integrates both textual and visual product information into a single index. This leads to a natural and coherent way to support multimodal searches.

The integration allows customers to express their interests in a variety of textual requests (e.g., keywords, brands, attributes, price ranges) jointly with visual queries. The visual querying is accomplished by consumers uploading a picture of the product they like as part of their product search.

You know, for Search! Awards (Business Transformation)

Our judging panel reviewed the applicants based on a project's importance, potential for growth, and whether the projects have fostered the breakdown of data silos.

T-Mobile USA
T-Mobile is a mobile phone network that recently launched a mobile app, combined with backend services, and uses the Elastic Stack to monitor the app's dynamic/personalized customer experiences and system health in real time.

The Elastic Stack helps T-Mobile monitor the dynamic content that is being served to customers, in addition to knowing where customers are navigating in the app as well as whether they are getting a fast user experience. Among other things, the Elastic Stack is also helping pinpoint where customers are using the app in real time.

"We are thrilled to be a 2019 Elastic Search Awards honoree! At T-Mobile, we're obsessed with listening to our customers and providing them with the best experiences. Elastic helps us deliver on that goal by giving us the tools to create personalized content for each customer," says Michael Mitchell, principal software engineer.

Brazilian Ministry of Health/DATASUS, through the work of Asper TI
DATASUS is the Health Informatics Department of the Brazilian Ministry of Health. It is the coordinator of the National Health Information System and the guardian of the National Health Information databases. A 2017 law in Brazil required the creation of a list of those who were waiting for any kind of procedure, exam, medical appointment or surgeries in any healthcare facilities of the public health service of the State of Santa Catarina.

Asper, an Elastic partner, is contracted by the Ministry of Health to implement and maintain their Elastic Stack services, was commissioned to make all of that data available via a REST API in order to allow this data to be consumed by any application, regardless of the programming language and through textual searches.

"We've been entrusted to handle the healthcare data of millions of Brazilian citizens, which means we have a duty of sensitivity and care. The work we do helps improve the systems that the National Health System relies on to help save lives," said Jesse Peixoto, an Asper technical leader on the project. "Being recognized as an honoree validates that work. The Elastic Stack is an integral part of the smooth functioning of the Brazilian health care system and we're passionate about the meaningful work that we get to do every day at DATASUS."

Meanwhile, Elastic continues accepting Elastic Search Awards submissions for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region through July 31 as well as for Asia Pacific and Japan until later on in 2019.

Shoutouts to all the applicants and honorees!

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