Swisscom info and facts
Employees waste up to 20 per cent of their time searching in their company Intranet. Based in Eastern Switzerland, software provider Hulbee aims to change this. The issue is all the more pressing because Google is taking its enterprise search solution off the market. Swisscom is using its knowhow to support sales and implementation.
Although searching for content in the Internet has vastly improved in recent years, the picture is not the same for Intranet portals where time seems to have stood still in many cases. Sifting out relevant information from a crop of superfluous search results is still a difficult task – recalling the early days of the Internet. These problems mount as company data volumes increase exponentially: the amount of available data in a company doubles every two years, leaving employees to search for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Swisscom is now teaming up with Swiss software provider Hulbee to launch a central solution which vastly simplifies searching for relevant documents, regardless of where they are stored in the company, to achieve search results comparable with those in the Internet. “Enterprise Search" is a flexible and scalable solution; in addition to internal use, it can also be used on the company’s website and external online shop. The advantage for companies is that they can tailor the search tool to suit their needs, safe in the knowledge that no external advertising will be included in the results. Customers can also choose "Enterprise Search" as a hosted service in Swisscom data centres or an on-premise service on their own servers.
One of few solutions available previously was the "Google Search Appliance": a hardware solution for using Google search technology on Intranet portals. However, this product is going to be taken off the market this year. Demand for new enterprise search solutions is therefore high. Not least because ineffective Intranet searching seriously dents productivity: employees spend up to a fifth of their time searching for internal information. Though many companies have realised this – by introducing new document filing systems they have achieved exactly the opposite: an ever-growing number of new storage locations, different file formats and often a doubling of cloud services simply increases search ramifications. As Andreas Wiebe, CEO of Hulbee AG remarks: "Although solution approaches are out there, they often fail to take hold because they are not user-friendly. The reason is simple: in our personal lives we tend to use search engines even to find addresses and domain names, so why go back to directories and filing systems at work? Our product is designed to close this gap."
"Enterprise Search" is used intuitively by the employee to quickly and reliably produce results: all information is scanned regardless of location and format and the results are automatically summarised as required.