Insurance group Royal & SunAlliance is running its
entire enterprise search system on a single backed-up Google
application server.
The company, which wrote £5.5bn worth of premiums last year, has
given all of its 24,000 employees in 130 countries the service,
which is provided by a
Google Search Appliance. The firm has a second box for
back-up.
Royal SunAlliance previously used a number of text-based search
engines, but these were too slow, could not find documents in all
formats, and were not constantly updated.
Tony Brierly, knowledge manager at Royal & SunAlliance, said
employees were frustrated by the time it was taking to find the
applications and tools staff needed to do their jobs.
The company can now complete a search in under a second rather
than in minutes.
"The search is available through the intranet to all our
employees and is already processing over 7000 searches a day. But
as people realise it is there, this will increase significantly,"
said Brierly.
Another advantage of the Google system is the removal of the
need for training. "People already know how to use Google, and we
did have to train them to work it."