IT DRILLDOWN
 
NEWSLETTERS
 

CIO.com updates, insights and advice on technology, management and your career.

 
 
 
LEADERSHIP
 
CIO Executive Programs
The Leader in Face-to-Face Education for Senior Executives

Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »

 
CIO Executive Council
A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Public Teleconferences
Join CIO Executive Council members and participate in the following live one-hour teleconferences:

* Transforming IT Teams
September 16

* Global CIOs: How to Lead on the World Stage
September 18

* Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits
October 29

More / Register »

Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »



 
 
RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 
SUBSCRIBE TO CIO
 
Are you involved in setting the direction for your company's IT budget or strategy?

Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!

 
 
 

How a Nuclear Waste Company Cleaned Up Its Enterprise Search Problem

How do you fix the document mess that happens when nine highly-technical companies combine in just two years? For EnergySolutions, the answer was enterprise search software from Autonomy.

 

July 10, 2008CIO

EnergySolutions, a leader among companies that process nuclear waste, seemed a prime candidate for new enterprise search technology. After all, the company, which reported $502 million in revenues for the first quarter of 2008, had formed from the combining of nine companies in two years, and each company had different document management systems and file types.

The files contained some of the company's most precious intellectual property, including engineering papers, drawings and safety documents. And the amount of storage these documents encompassed was astonishing, says EnergySolutions CIO, Carol Fineagan. "It's not a technical term, but it was a bazillion terabytes," she says.

Picking one document management system and ditching the others wasn't an option, Fineagan says. "The structure of these document management systems meant a lot to the engineers who developed the data on each of them," she says. "They know what [electronic] filing cabinets to go to when they want to find something. Plus I'm almost 49, and I would not live long enough to convert all the data out of their native document systems over to one, whichever the winner would be."

Two years ago, Fineagan began looking at the enterprise search vendor landscape. Her search was two-pronged: she wanted a search tool to work on users' individual desktops, but another to serve the enterprise needs of culling data from the various document management systems.

For the enterprise-wide search, she looked at what she described as the major vendors at the time: Fast (now a Microsoft subsidiary), Endeca, Google and its search appliance, and Autonomy. She settled on Autonomy. According to Fineagan, Automony was best suited to recognize and pull information from the company's plethora of document types.

"JPEGs, e-mails, MS Office documents, video—you name it and we had it," Fineagan says. "Some of this stuff went back to the early 1980's. We needed something that could make sense of older file types, manage the indexes."

When the Expensive Choice Makes Sense

According to a report by Forrester Research in May, Autonomy is a top choice in its category for large enterprises, largely based on the fact it can read old documents and file types.

"It's not that others (such as Google and its search appliance) can't hook into well-known places," says Leslie Owens, the Forrester analyst who authored the report. "But large enterprises with complex needs and certain file types usually go with a higher end search product [like Autonomy] because of the scalability."

Loading...
TOOLS
CONNECTIONS
EnergySolutions
Autonomy
Google
 
 
ABCs
 

Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.

Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.

 
 
FEATURED SPONSORS
 
 
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

Solving Online Credit Fraud Using Device Reputation

Weigh the trade-offs between outsourcing communications and keeping it on-premise.

Stimulating Innovation: Meeting IT's New Mission

Fuel the Responsive Enterprise Through Oracle Fusion Middleware

Balance Your Innovation and Efficiency Platforms for Competitive Advantage and Responsiveness

The Challenge of Network Access Control -- Is a Managed Service the Answer?

Unified Communications: "More Than Just Talk"

A Closer Look at SaaS Purchasing Behaviors and Attitudes

31 Best Practices for the Service Desk

Enhancing Online Sales and Support

Extending the Enterprise Network Through Mobility

Spam-proof your business with Google's hosted security solutions

Global Crossing is the most viable alternative for voice, video and data

Plan better, manage better

Dell Latitude: Battery life up to 19 hours. Learn more

Video: 21st Century Networking for a 12th Century Castle

Speed, agility, flexibility - The HP BladeSystem c-Class

Secure your virtual and physical environments with the same software

GET YOUR VoIP ONTM! Win 2 Years of Hosted VoIP from Cypress. $100,000 retail value. Enter today!

Getting in Compliance with Government Data Regulations

Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report: Save Millions in Fraud Losses.

Document Management 2.0 -- Web-based Collaboration and the Road to Compliance

Accelerating ITIL at the Service Desk

Putting Open source to the test

Protecting Data in a Highly Networked World

The Benefits of Data Deduplication for Data Protection in the Enterprise

Webcast: Roundtable discusses industry trends for Enterprise Content Management

How the Mac is Becoming an IT Standard in the Enterprise

Drive More Effective Business Processes with SOA

Reap the Benefits of Unified Communications

Strategic IT Financial Management - Achieve Higher Organizational Performance

New research validates telepresence solutions.

How to Calculate the ROI of Remote Support

Implementing Knowledge Management

Putting Windows Server and Citrix to Work in the Enterprise

HP Puts Its Disaster-tolerant Capabilities to the Test

Compuware.com - See how we make IT rock around the world

CA delivers deeper insight into your assets, resources, projects & services so you can make more informed IT decisions

Discover PMI's credentials and career path tools

SOA Educational Library at the TIBCO SOA Resource Center

TDWI Report shows strong validation for investing in predictive analytics

Learn about the software-based VoIP solution from Microsoft

Microsoft System Center - Designed For Big

The Latest Advancements in SSL Technology

How to Offer the Strongest SSL Encryption

Destination: Intelligent Data Center Automation

Build up or Tear down? See how UC makes sense with Nortel. Calculate your UC ROI

Virtual Support Technology Delivers Quantifiable Gains in Productivity and Performance

File Integrity Monitoring: Secure Your Virtual & Physical IT Environments

Consolidation: Just the Starting Point for Virtualization