Enterprise Search That Makes Financial Sense

It’s no secret that enterprises everywhere are in the midst of major change. Budgets are getting tighter. Corporate priorities are shifting to issues such as environmental responsibility. And the pressure to win new business and retain existing customers is intense. For many IT groups, the realities of today’s economy can be daunting.

Only the shrewdest technology leaders are addressing these challenges. They are doing it by focusing on enterprise search and information access technology, and an IT strategy that clearly aligns with messages heard in boardrooms everywhere: "live within your means;" "be environmentally responsible;" and "win new business."

Here are three ways to help your IT organization align with a winning enterprise search and information access strategy:

1. Improve access across key search based business applications within your enterprise. While many search vendors tout the importance of accessing the 80% of the unstructured information in an enterprise, it’s vital you think about the remaining 20%. Ask yourself what is the most important data in your organization and where it resides? Customer information, business intelligence, logistics data and marketing analytics are frequently created and stored in complex databases.

The problem facing many organizations is it’s extremely difficult to search through these systems along with unstructured content. Many business applications are built on relational databases, which are plagued by an inability to deliver the type of user-friendly search that people know from the Internet. And it’s neither efficient nor cost-effective to rely on IT personnel to execute complex SQL searches on behalf of business users.

Increasingly, companies are turning to search-based business applications to solve this problem. These search-based business applications are essentially high-end enterprise search engines that come with built-in connectors to your critical business applications as well as the many unstructured content sources across your organization. In addition, these search-based applications include an API so you can easily create a connector to less common content sources.

Scalability is also critical. With information doubling in volume across an enterprise every six to 12 months, you need search technology that has no limitations on the number of users or volume of data indexed.

Deploying the right enterprise search and information access software will help your company’s employees uncover the critical information they need, quickly and easily. It will help them make faster, more informed decisions, identify business opportunities
and generate revenue. And it will give your organization an edge in today’s fiercely competitive market.

2. Ask search vendors the hard questions. The cost and capabilities of enterprise search and information access solutions vary widely. Functionality ranges from light keyword indexation of mainly Web content to rich autonomous clustering and classification of data using advanced semantic and statistical techniques. Costs likewise vary, ranging from $5,000 to $5 million a year, with recurring annual costs reaching upward of 50%-80% of first-year costs.

Before deciding on a solution for your enterprise, it’s imperative you ask the right questions. For example, how many servers will be required to handle the anticipated query load? How much can you expect to pay on database licenses, hardware and maintenance costs?

Cost-benefit comparisons of leading enterprise search vendors frequently show remarkable differences. For example, in 2009, a major online media organization evaluated Exalead against another highly touted enterprise search provider. The media organization learned that the newer technology in Exalead’s search and information access software required 80 fewer servers, $750 million less in hardware investments, as much as $500,000 less in power consumption costs, as well as $450,000 savings in software licenses. With savings like these and in this tough economy, search becomes an investment CTOs can justify, even to the toughest CFO.

3. Go green or go home. Yes, even IT has a role to play in the push for more environmental responsibility. The amount of electric power, space and cooling required for IT equipment and data centers at large organizations is increasing rapidly. This negatively affects not only the carbon footprint of your corporate office, but also your company’s bottom line. Recent research reveals electrical power costs over the life of a data center can exceed the cost of IT equipment. The power consumption in some data centers will exceed $1.2 million in a five-year span.

There are things you can do to increase energy efficiency and reduce costs in your IT organization. For example, when evaluating enterprise search and information access technology, you need to carefully consider the hardware requirements for your business.

The best vendors have engineered search functionality with significantly less hardware. Fewer servers means the need for less storage space as well as relaxed electricity and cooling requirements. So, never underestimate the value of thinking green when it comes to IT efficiency.

Exalead Helps Deliver the Goods
If you have questions about the effect of search-based business applications in today’s economy, then you need to consider the case of the GEFCO Group.

GEFCO is one of the largest logistics and transportation companies in the world. The company chose Exalead’s search-based application software to help it run its business more efficiently. Exalead is powering a critical logistics application for GEFCO.

"We now have faster access to information, reliable data and more operational reporting tools, allowing our sales department and global management teams to make better informed decisions," explains Guillaume Rabier, manager of studies and projects for GEFCO. "This in turn, enables us to offer a better service to customers and to differentiate ourselves from competitors."

GEFCO also touts the IT efficiencies it has seen. "With Exalead, we are using database off-loading to intelligently rationalize the use of our resource systems," continues Rabier. "By maintaining a separate index, fewer of the users’ queries run against the database itself. This in turn reduces the load on the database servers which generates results faster and produces greater IT efficiencies."

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Founded in 2000, Exalead S.A. is a revolutionary global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. More than 100 million unique users a month employ Exalead’s technology for search, including leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Michelin, American Greetings and Sanofi Aventis. Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or underutilized data and content in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. This cutting-edge technology makes Exalead one of the most important companies contributing to the fields of digital content search, discovery, management, contact center enablement, security and storage. Headquartered in Paris, France, with a global office network covering Europe, the United Kingdom and North America, you can find more information about Exalead at www.exalead.com.