Business Impact Article - Posted 5/28/2009

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Reed Business

Building a Business Strategy Around Search

Reed Business is a division of Reed Elsevier, a world-leading publisher and information provider employing 36,000 people in over 200 locations worldwide. It needed to implement an Enterprise Search solution. Having undertaken a full review of the available Enterprise Search solutions, Reed Business chose FAST for its scalability, security, flexibility, and speed.

Reed Business

A world-leading publisher and information provider employing 36,000 people in over 200 locations worldwide, Reed Business is a division of Reed Elsevier. Its two parent companies—Reed Elsevier PLC (REL) and Reed Elsevier NV (REN)—are listed on the London and Amsterdam Stock Exchanges. Reed Elsevier is split into four divisions: Business, Legal, Education, Science and Medical. Reed Business is the world’s largest business publisher.

Challenge

All magazine publishers must re-assess their businesses as on-the-page advertising diminishes and Internet advertising grows. Although it has become commonplace for business-to-business information consumers to use generic search engines, research shows that business-to-business (B2B) users have become frustrated with the lack of focus and relevance—a third of B2B searches result in failure to find appropriate content.

Graeme McCracken, Chief Operating Officer for Reed Business Search (RB Search), explains how he outlined the stark business challenge to divisional chief executives at a strategic meeting in 2005: 

“At this key meeting I explained that Google and Yahoo are here to stay, and 59 percent of advertising dollars is migrating out of traditional media to Internet search. It’s not new money. A portion of that is our existing revenue. If we don’t have an offer in that market, how can we expect to exploit it?”

At the time, he admits, “Google could search our material better than we could.” Senior management grasped the importance of the argument and gave immediate approval to move ahead with an investment in an Enterprise Search platform. 

“Normally what would happen in a big company like Reed Elsevier is that you’d be sent away to explore other options. But they approved it there and then. Reed Business is a fantastic company to work for when you come up with a compelling concept.”

Why FAST?

Having undertaken a full review of the available Enterprise Search solutions, Reed Business chose FAST for a number of reasons. Graeme McCracken says that he was already aware of the FAST technology through other divisions of Reed Elsevier, where it is used very effectively to search legal and scientific material, although this did not influence his final decision.

Speed, scalability, security, and flexibility were all vital factors, and FAST fulfilled all criteria. The technology not only carries out fast searches, but also allows for industry leading volumes of new information to be indexed—and re-indexed, if necessary—at high speed. This means that the answers that customers receive are based on the most up-to-date information.

Scalability was essential because the system needed to be able to handle hundreds of millions of documents. Other products failed to deliver the required level of scalability.

It was also crucial for Reed Business to be able to fine-tune the system to reflect changing user needs, and to make continuous improvements to the service. Other offerings also failed on this score, and were unable to support the range of indexing that McCracken sought.

FAST not only gives Reed Business the scalability needed to handle vast amounts of information virtually in real time, but it is very flexible. “With FAST we can tune virtually anything we want to. FAST technology allows us to categorize, tag, and define links between data in any way we like,” says McCracken. This means that Reed Business can easily adapt to changing search habits of users, and adopt an approach of continuous improvement, without disrupting the service at any time.

Solution

McCracken and his team re-engineered the Reed Business search infrastructure, using FAST technology, which delivers the flexibility and scalability to create a wide range of search platforms to support new services. In the early stages of the project, he took advantage of FAST’s Search Best Practice (SBP) consultancy offering, tailored to the needs of his team. “As part of a project kick-off session, we had our business team and then our technical team work through the approach with FAST and took their advice,” he says. 

We chose FAST, because we felt they were the best in the Enterprise Search space. The products do exactly what they say on the tin, delivering the scalability and security we need to transform our business model and provide our users with instant, relevant responses. We wanted to deploy quickly and the FAST team has delivered. Graeme McCracken Chief Operating Officer, Reed Business Search

In addition, he sent 24 developers on two one-week courses at FAST University. Once the system had been developed it took just one week to install and configure it on 60 servers.

The first fruit of this work is Zibb (www.zibb.com), a specialized search tool for B2B users, which is designed to find answers quickly without flooding users with irrelevant information.

Business users are usually looking for something extremely specific, such as a dealer for a product, or even a specific part number. General search engines throw up masses of irrelevant information, while research has shown that existing specialized directories do not drill down to the required level of detail.

The speed and relevance of the search is fulfilled, as all information is indexed according to RB Search’s sophisticated categories and definitions.

“We were initially indexing data from over 1,100 of Reed Business’s Web sites, but we now index content from the whole B2B publishing industry,” states McCracken.

The Reed approach is consequently to treat all information the same without any bias towards Reed data, so that other publishers will also benefit from the traffic generated by Zibb searches.

“As soon as anything new appears on any of the Web sites, our system knows about it, and it is placed in a searchable index within seconds,” says McCracken.

In addition, the flexibility and speed of FAST technology allows RB Search to reorganize the way it indexes information very quickly.

“Search changes your whole philosophy on the world, certainly from an IT perspective,” he says. “With relational databases, you have to get it right the first time. If you get it wrong it costs time, money, and effort to change. In the search world, you can be more entrepreneurial. If you get things wrong, you can change them. You can easily re-index the information—with FAST, we can do it at 2,000 documents a second. One of our publications holds 38,000 documents, for example. It means we can throw the whole thing away and have a new index built in 19 seconds. Even with all the time and money in the world, this could not be achieved any other way.”

Zibb is the first search service of many that RB Search plans to offer. Others include specific site searches for Web sites of Reed’s 900 individual titles (www.designnews.com), with specially tuned functions.

Benefits and Results

The Zibb project using FAST allows users to instantly find the most up-to-date, relevant answers to specific questions from over 200 million documents and millions of Web sites. This achieves Reed Business’s objective to protect and extend advertising revenues.

“We could have shielded ourselves behind registration walls (i.e., tried to make money by making people pay for information), but Google would have starved us out,” he says.

By making Zibb the search engine of choice for business users, the site will earn advertising revenue while also driving people to the individual Web sites and titles within the Reed Business stable.

It is important to note that the board approved FAST as a strategic tool to support the whole company, rather than getting each of the divisions to devise their own search solution. 

“Our investment in FAST has given us the capability to build the factory that enables us to generate new services, once and once only—and this strongly appealed to the board,” McCracken says. “We decided to ‘build the future now’, and by building the future now, we can do it in the right way, and not deal with the any of the baggage of our infrastructure. Using .NET and a Web services infrastructure, FAST has given us the ability to build our search system flexibly, in a decoupled way to create limitless possibilities.”

“We chose FAST, because we felt they were the best in the Enterprise Search space. The products do exactly what they say on the tin, delivering the scalability and security we need to transform our business model and provide our users with instant, relevant responses. We wanted to deploy quickly and the FAST team has delivered,” says McCracken.

For more information about FAST, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch