Jeff Fried, the VP Product Management, at Fast led an interesting session Business Transformation Powered by Search at the recent Fast Forward Summit in Boston. He set the context by saying that the magnitude of new information has help drive the growth of Fast search. There are now 1,300,000,000 users on the web and 100,000,000 active domains. Jeff said that search can drive productivity by unlocking silos and partitioned this concept into three themes:

First, there is information discovery. You do not want to get blind sided by business competitors. The majority of Cisco.com users find their information through search. It helps customers make purchase decisions and reduces customer support costs. Cisco recently launched a big project to improve search and their top goal was to make information access more customer centric, the next theme Jeff raised.

Best Buy – a Fast client – gives credit to customer centric search for helping transform their online business. They gained market share by experiencing no down time in search on their site even in peak times. Career Builder was neck & neck with Monster.com a few years ago. Now Career Builder, a Fast customer, is well ahead by providing a better search experience for users. The Bowen Craggs survey on effectiveness of web site named Siemens, a Fast client, as number one.

Finally, operational intelligence is another goal that can be supported by effective search. Jeff said it is important to try to make search not a black box, but open and extensible. He showed this great picture of a giant needle sticking out of a hay stack and said search should be called “find.” He discussed the Merrill Lynch research library. In this enterprise case, the paradigm of a single search box does not apply. Researchers need rich filtering to be effective. This also true in pharma where Fast powers 6 of the top 10 pharma companies. These are information companies. For example, Orion needed to consolidate the many avenues to search. A typical job task used 8 different sources so Orion needed one search experience that drew on many sources. At the same, it had to go to very precise results to increase productivity of pharma researchers. Fast provided this single source.

Reuters had a traditional financial trading desk that was overly complex with dense data presentations. Now Reuters changed to a search driven experience to clean up the desk and increased productivity for their traders.

Jeff said there is a trend that enterprise search and business intelligence are converging, Unstructured and structured data world were very separate. Business intelligence world operated in structured searches and data. Enterprise search is now moving more into structured data world. I think that business intelligence also needs to look at unstructured data more and more.

Jeff provided another example, a large Australian telecommunications provider. Its customer information is their core asset but they grew into 11 different customer information data bases – billing, service, etc. These were not in synch which created a big problem. Much of data is very structured and was hard to integrate. Now they combined the data sources through search. It reduced confusion and broke down their information silos. Search can enable unique user experiences and provide the match of unique intent with content.

Jeff said there is still room for improvement. A recent Wall Street Journal article said that 49% of respondents feel finding information within the enterprise is difficult. My experience says that this is a big improvement over the past. Fast is working to make those numbers of frustrated continue to go down further.