Partner Spotlight: Searchplex
GenAI is transforming commerce—fast. What started with Q&A chatbots has already evolved into deep research applications and, now, autonomous AI agents. Vespa is proud to be at the center of this shift, enabling some of the most proficient adopters of AI, such as Perplexity. To help organizations maximize the benefits of Vespa, we’re building a robust partner ecosystem. These partners help bring Vespa’s AI-native capabilities into real-world deployments across industries.
We’re excited to spotlight our partners here on our blog and through our Vespa Voice podcast series.
Meet the innovators helping shape the future of GenAI. Today’s spotlight: Searchplex
Vespa Implementation Services: From Migration to Production Scale
The journey from evaluating Vespa to running production workloads at scale involves numerous technical decisions, architectural considerations, and operational challenges. While Vespa’s documentation and examples provide solid foundations, organizations often benefit from experienced guidance when navigating complex migration scenarios, optimizing performance for specific use cases, or extending capabilities for specialized requirements.
As an official Vespa partner, Searchplex has been delivering Vespa-powered solutions for clients since 2023. This hands-on experience ensures that we not only understand Vespa’s capabilities but also know how to implement and scale them effectively. Our deep expertise allows us to guide clients through the complexities of migration and new implementations, ensuring both a smooth transition and high-performance results.
The Reality of Vespa Implementations
Over the past two years, we’ve observed common patterns in how organizations approach Vespa adoption. Teams typically fall into two categories: those migrating from existing search infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr) and those building new AI-powered search and recommendation systems from scratch. Each path presents distinct challenges.
Migration projects often involve more than just moving data. Schema conversion, query translation, and performance optimization require deep understanding of both source and target systems. For organizations running production workloads, minimizing downtime while ensuring functional parity becomes critical.
New implementations, while avoiding legacy constraints, face different complexities. Determining optimal cluster configurations, designing efficient ranking expressions, and implementing proper monitoring and alerting require experience with Vespa’s operational characteristics across different scales and use cases.
Flexible Service Packages for Different Entry Points
Based on real-world project experience, we’ve developed specialized service packages that address the most common implementation challenges. Organizations can engage with these services independently, based on their specific needs and current stage in their Vespa journey. This flexible approach recognizes that each organization’s entry point and requirements are unique.
Explore: Migration Readiness Assessment
Before any migration begins, understanding the current architecture, data volumes, query patterns, and performance requirements provides the foundation for successful planning. This includes cluster sizing analysis, deployment strategy recommendations, and risk assessment for business-critical systems. This proactive approach ensures clarity and confidence before initiating migration projects.
Commit: Migration Services
The technical migration process involves schema conversion, query translation, data pipeline development, and comprehensive testing throughout the transition. For organizations moving from Elasticsearch or Solr, this includes mapping existing functionality to Vespa’s model while identifying opportunities for improvement through Vespa’s advanced features.
Testing includes both regression and functional validation against the current production stack. This ensures the new Vespa solution matches existing system performance while identifying areas for improvement. We validate that all critical functionality works correctly before production deployment.
Build: Solution Development
Whether developing proof-of-concept applications or full production systems, building effective Vespa solutions requires careful attention to AI search capabilities, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) implementations, query optimization, and data pipeline design. For organizations exploring Vespa’s capabilities through PoCs, this includes rapid prototyping and validation of core functionality. Production implementations focus on creating robust, scalable systems that deliver consistent performance under real-world conditions.
Optimize: Audit and Performance Tuning
Once systems are operational, performance optimization becomes crucial. This involves architecture audits, relevance tuning, resource & cost optimization, and A/B testing frameworks. The goal is maximizing efficiency while maintaining or improving search quality.
Extend: Custom Extensions
For specific situations requiring enhanced capabilities, Vespa supports extensions through Java-based custom searchers, document processing extensions, custom HTTP endpoints, and specialized plugins. This level of customization requires a deep understanding of Vespa’s architecture and extension points, areas where experienced guidance proves valuable.
Technical Depth and Practical Experience
The value in implementation services comes from accumulated experience across diverse projects. Understanding how Vespa behaves under different load patterns, how to optimize for specific data types and query patterns, and how to troubleshoot performance issues in production environments requires time and direct experience.
Our engineering team has delivered Vespa implementations across various industries and use cases since 2023, including the development of a multilingual legal RAG platform, the migration and building of AI search solutions in the fintech sector, audits for patent searches, and more. Each project has provided insights into Vespa’s operational characteristics and best practices.
Training and Ongoing Support
Beyond implementation services, we offer targeted training workshops designed to empower internal teams with practical knowledge of Vespa architecture, schema design, query optimization, and operational best practices. This ensures organizations can build internal capabilities and maintain their Vespa deployments with confidence.
For organizations seeking additional operational expertise, we provide support services designed to complement Vespa’s own offerings. Our team can assist with troubleshooting, best practices, and ongoing operational guidance, regardless of deployment model. This flexible approach ensures teams have access to experienced Vespa engineers to help maintain stability and performance.
Moving Forward with Confidence
The Vespa ecosystem continues evolving with new features and capabilities. Having experienced implementation partners helps organizations adopt these advances effectively while maintaining stable production systems.
For organizations considering Vespa for their search and recommendation infrastructure, our specialized service packages can accelerate time to value while reducing technical risks. The combination of proven methodologies and real-world experience provides a foundation for successful Vespa deployments.
Ready to explore how Vespa can transform your search infrastructure? Whether you’re evaluating migration options, building new AI-powered search capabilities, or optimizing existing deployments, our team can help you navigate the journey successfully.
For more information and detailed case studies, please visit Searchplex’s Vespa.ai Consulting Services Overview.
Never miss a story from us, subscribe to our newsletter