Thousands of Onvia Clients Now Upgraded to Superior Search Experience

SEATTLE, Dec. 8, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Onvia (NASDAQ: ONVI), leading commerce intelligence in business-to-government (B2G), today announced that all of Onvia's thousands of business clients have been successfully upgraded to Onvia 7's machine tagging search paradigm. This process required hands-on migration and on-boarding for each client search led by Onvia's team of client success advisors. Now, more than 100,000 unique client searches are tailored to match their industry, product or service and are delivered with enhanced volume, quality and relevance of government contract leads.

Onvia's B2G Intelligence System (B2GIS), powered by advanced algorithms and an ever-evolving ontology, helps businesses discover qualified opportunities matching their products and services. It does this by using natural language processing to apply tags to projects, eliminating the need for restrictive keyword searches.

"Government agencies describe solicitations their way and in their own terms, while vendors search for leads using their product, service or industry terminology – that language barrier creates friction," said Chris Woerner, Senior Vice President of Product. "Picture this, an agency issues a bid to automate travel requests, while a technology vendor searches for leads to supply workflow software. With dynamic tag based searches, we're able to render the most relevant results for our clients, reducing noise and increasing precision. Our technology even addresses term variations in solicitations and misspellings. The end result is more matching, less noise and no opportunity lost in translation."

Onvia has curated thousands of terms and variations found in government contract solicitations into a proprietary ontology that covers over 200 industry segments – it's the foundation for how projects are tagged. These methods are superior to keyword-based searches and allow for the greatest possible search flexibility, making it easy for users to sift through millions of procurement records for all projects containing a particular concept and all its known variants. The end result is increased recall and precision of client search results.

The tagging step in Onvia's Data Value Chain presents a generational leap in search performance over bid scrapers who rely on general keywords or a specific set of static categories, which cannot be updated as freely as dynamic tag-based searches.

"Our search results are now more relevant and actionable than ever," said Jason Brown, Director of Business Development at The Safariland Group. "With a high volume of targeted and relevant leads for our business, we're now able to focus more time on responding to solicitations, building relationships with government buyers and growing our public sector sales."

To complete migration of all clients to tag-based searches, Onvia's data, technology and product teams worked together to innovate not only the search technologies but also the underlying infrastructure to ensure scalability.

"Our data value chain ingests millions of procurement records from tens of thousands of government agencies. We made significant improvements to our technology stack to enable us to scale rapidly while continuing to maintain our best-in-class standards around coverage, quality and turnaround time in the industry," said Naveen Rajkumar, Senior Vice President and CIO. "We upgraded our search technology with a move to Elastic Search in Q2 2016 and made significant improvements to our database layer by incorporating Mongo DB in Q3 2016 – with these upgrades we're now able to improve search performance, increase overall publishing capacity, and expand our coverage into more useful data types for our business clients and agency partners."

Now that all of Onvia's business clients are upgraded to dynamic tag-based searches, and underlying technology enhancements are in place, users have easy access to the most comprehensive, timely and actionable B2G data in the market. The completion of client search migrations rounds off a year where Onvia made investments in sourcing data directly from government agencies to expand coverage via the Onvia Exchange, rolled out integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and made continued refinements in ontology, tagging and overall user experience.

About Onvia 
Onvia (NASDAQ: ONVI) is the leading commerce intelligence company at the core of the business-to-government (B2G) marketplace. Applying advanced technologies and domain expertise, Onvia curates data about millions of exchanged contracts, agencies and decision makers, vendors and channels, projects and investment plans, awards records and market trends. Our B2G Intelligence System (B2GIS) delivers quality leads, process agility and strategic foresight, equipping companies of all sizes to grow their public sector business and government agencies to gain procurement efficiency. Resolving the friction in this vital, complex, multi-trillion-dollar marketplace, we create mutual value for private and public sectors, taxpayers and society at large.

Visit http://www.onvia.com to explore what makes business, government and media trust Onvia for B2G market insights.

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SOURCE Onvia, Inc.

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