WHITE PAPER
Why Search Matters: Quantifying the Business Value of
Google Search Appliance Solutions
Sponsored by: Google
David Schubmehl
July 2014
Randy Perry
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The amount of data that organizations need to deal with on a daily basis is increasing exponentially.
According to the IDC-EMC's Digital Universe Study, the amount of
digital information will explode from 4.4 zettabytes to 44 zettabytes
1
Business Value Highlights
by 2020 and today 90% of that information is unstructured . This is
creating a dilemma and challenge that almost all organizations will
 Reduced time for search by 74%
need to address: what tools and technologies can they use to help
 Improved User Productivity by 1.5%
their knowledge workers to be more productive, innovate faster and
 Reduced cost of business
leverage information to generate revenue?
operations by 11%
 Reduced customer service costs by
Increasingly, the answer to that question lies in developing and
36%
using information location and discovery tools known as search Increased revenue by 1.4%
based applications. Search-based applications are purpose built
 Generated an ROI of 411% and
solutions often including workflow that integrate information from
payback in 7.9 months
many data sources and use search and information retrieval
technologies to help knowledge workers locate, discover and act
on hidden information within their organizations in order to do their
jobs more productively. Examples of search-based applications include research and development
portals, integrated 360 degree customer information applications, stock and financial analyst
workbenches and a host of other task specific solutions based on information location and discovery.
Google is and has been a leader in providing search technologies to its customers on the web since its
inception. It has also created revolutionary enterprise search technologies for organizations in the form
of its Google Search Appliance (GSA). The ease of installation, customization and use of the GSA
combined with its worldwide network of partners and its cost effective nature have made it one of the
most popular options for providing enterprise search within an organization.
The key highlights of why organizations choose the GSA are as follows:

Ease of installation – overall, customers find the GSA extremely easy to install and set up.

Wide range of connectors – the GSA offers a number of connectors and crawlers to index
information across an organization including web sites, file shares, content management
systems like SharePoint, ERP systems and the ability to build custom connectors.
July 2014, IDC #249645

Customizability – organizations can use GSA APIs, indexing options and results flexibility to
develop application specific search-based solutions.

Cost – the GSA is a cost effective solution due to its relatively low cost and high functionality.

Efficiency and relevance – customers interviewed by IDC indicated that their users considered
the GSA's search results to be faster and more relevant than other search solutions used.

Reputation – Google's ability to provide high quality web search gives users a sense of
confidence and reliability with Google for enterprise search.
The increase in unstructured information combined with the increasing pressure to improve knowledge
worker productivity has made locating the right information at the right time more imperative than ever.
In addition, IDC research has shown time and time again that in general, knowledge workers are not
happy with the search capabilities that their enterprise search system provides. Information driven
organizations need to improve their capabilities around enterprise search in order to maximize
revenue, manage costs and increase productivity. IDC research shows that the GSA accomplishes all
of these goals.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Today, leading organizations understand that information is an asset and that identifying, organizing
and locating that information is key to growing and expanding their businesses. However, for almost
every organization, that information is located in dozens, if not more, places and repositories that have
grown up over the last ten to fifteen years. At the same time, more information is being accumulated
daily and users are having a difficult time keeping up. Organizations are becoming knowledge centric
and the ability to effectively locate and use information such as research reports, sales orders and
customer service logs can be a key differentiator.
Role specific search-based applications are becoming popular because knowledge workers' jobs are
specializing and the information needed varies according to their needs. Research scientists need
access to general research journals as well as patent filings and the organizations own research
information. Customer service agents need access to product documentation, order histories and prior
discussions with customers. In each case, these knowledge workers need access to a range of
information, but the information type varies by their job function. In both cases, the search-based
applications developed for these roles make information available from several repositories and
include functions and workflows specific to the knowledge worker's task.
The ability to develop discovery oriented applications that are specific to certain departmental
functions or vertical markets is creating opportunities within organizations to improve their overall
information handling and access processes. Typical use cases include:

Customer support applications tie together all of the information needed to answer a
customer's questions or problems simply and easily. Reducing the number of calls and the
time spent with customers on solutions to their problems can have a significant impact on an
organization's bottom line and reputation.
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
Research and development portals are changing the face of research for many organizations.
The ability to easily locate and work with all of the IP within and outside of an organization can
lead to new discoveries and products resulting in millions of dollars of revenue per year.

Customer facing web sites and ecommerce sites can generate significant revenue by
providing relevant and timely information about products and services.
In all of these cases, organizations are using enterprise search to facilitate a wide range of business
processes that result in lower costs, greater revenue and improved productivity and innovation.
GOOGLE SEARCH APPLIANCE
Google's efforts in providing web users with a superior search experience are well known and have set
the standard for all other vendors in the web search market. The Google Search Appliance (GSA)
does the same for the enterprise and provides quick, relevant and secure access to information across
the organization, regardless of document format or location.
The GSA is a document based scalable hardware/software solution that offers a Google-like search
experience for businesses' file shares, databases, content management systems, enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems, and other internal data, as well as for their intranet and public websites. The
GSA provides the searchability, relevance and ease of use of Google.com, but with specific enterprise
enhancements that make information location and discovery faster, more secure, and more capable of
suggesting appropriate content through the use of features like dynamic navigation, user-added
results, and expert search.
The GSA can provide unified access and searchability to all of an organization's content through the use of
its many content connectors. These connectors provide indexing access to file shares, web sites, relational
database systems like Oracle, IBM DB2, SharePoint 2013 and others as well as content management
systems such as OpenText's Livelink, EMC Documentum and IBM Filenet. In addition, connectors to other
systems such as SAP, Salesforce and PeopleSoft are also available. The GSA supports over 200 different
file types, including Microsoft Office, PDFs, HTML and many business application formats.
The GSA uses document level security and provides integration with corporate wide security such as
LDAP and NTLM using single sign-on. This level of security is respected throughout all of the content
that the GSA indexes, regardless of the initial source. The GSA is simple to install and easy to
implement. Administrators can tune results ranking to the needs of their organization, or provide
different departments with their own customized settings. The GSA also supports entity recognition, so
important dates, places, names and facts are automatically extracted and stored as document
metadata for use by searchers. Users have the ability while searching to make use of search features
such as auto-complete, best bets, key matches, search alerts, spell check, results clustering and social
search features enabling users to promote documents against specific queries.
Google provides simple administration though an advanced web console and supports multiple GSA
deployments within an organization for both hot backup and to integrate search indices across
appliances so that users see a single set of unified results, not multiple results coming from each
appliance. This provides a level of scalability and run time security that allows organizations to index
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potentially billions of documents across an enterprise. In addition, the GSA provides a wealth of
administrative reporting on user access, hit and relevance accuracy, click-through rates and other
useful statistics. Finally, the administrator console can be used in many different languages as well.
The GSA supports over 20 different languages for indexing and search purposes. For indexing, it
provides auto language detection so that organizations don't need to explicitly identify the language of
a target document. It also provides real-time translation of result documents into more than 70
languages by using an integration with Google Translate.
The GSA provides many options for customizing and developing search-based applications that use
the features and capabilities of the appliance. Developers and administrators can create customized
search results layout pages using XSLT style sheets or the GSA's layout design wizard. The GSA also
provides APIs for administration, search access and even document translation. The GSA's APIs allow
organizations or partners to develop and customize search-based applications that access GSA
functionality. For example, a research portal application can have a button to automatically translate
patents found with a GSA search into English from their native language, regardless of whether the
original document was in German, French or even Chinese.
BUSINESS VALUE
Study Demographics
IDC interviewed 13 customers using GSA to support one or more of the following activities critical to
their businesses:

Organization intranet – intranet search solutions provide corporate information workers with
easy, just-in-time access to corporate knowledge assets by indexing data and documents from
a variety of sources such as file systems, intranet web pages, ERP systems, document
management systems, e-mail, instant messaging and collaboration systems as well as popular
database repositories. Potential users of such applications include marketing staff looking for
the most recent product information, HR personnel searching for resumes or job descriptions;
employees looking for benefit information, etc.

Customer service (customer support portals and/or customer self-service portals) - customer
service search solutions provide product and procedure related information to customer
service agents in a simple yet comprehensive manner by indexing data and documents from a
variety of sources such as CRM systems, order entry systems, customer emails and call
transcripts as well as all available product information. This information provides a 360 degree
view of the customer for agents and allows them to easily access and refer to all related data
on a particular customer.

Public-facing web site (excluding customer support portals) – public website search solutions
provide information search access and results to an organization's corporate website as well
as the organization's products and services. The search solution may include site search
functionality for locating, identifying and recommending products based on a searcher's
interests and/or search history.
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Table 1 shows the average demographics of the 13 organizations that were interviewed by IDC.
TABLE 1
Average Demographics
Employees*
53,473
Internal users
52,382
Internal Google GSA users
42,973
Annual growth of Google GSA users
Annual customer service customers
Customer growth
Public-facing Web site customers
Customer growth
Industries
9%
17,798,640
10%
4,959,312
42%
Financial services, communications, government, electronics manufacturer,
software manufacturer, equipment manufacturer, and healthcare
*The size of companies interviewed for this study ranged from 1,600 employees to 300,000+ employees.
Source: IDC, 2014
FINANCIAL BENEFITS ANALYSIS
The focus of this study is on the business benefits experienced by GSA customers as a result of
implementing the GSA enterprise search solution. Figure 1 shows the average annual savings using
the GSA by the customers interviewed by IDC. The specific areas of improvement highlighted by
Figure 1 are:

Increasing user productivity - GSA's more efficient search performance is freeing up endusers' time from search activities while leveraging the benefits of search – information flow,
collaboration and data analysis. On average each organization is increasing user productivity
by 1.5% for an annual benefit of $1.6 million ($2,977 per 100 users);

Reducing business operations costs – GSA customers are leveraging search to create more
efficient business processes and reducing labor costs by $882,994 ($1,533 per 100 users);

Increasing revenue - GSA customers are capturing more revenue as a result of exploiting
search capabilities to speed up the time to market for new products and services and
accelerate the acquisition of new customers. IDC projects that these organizations are
increasing their operating margins by an average of $327,723 ($626 per 100 users) per year;
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Reducing Infrastructure costs – On average the GSA had a 27% lower TCO than the other
search solutions that GSA customers had been using before primarily due to its greater ease
of deployment and maintenance and configuration resulting in $46,164 ($88 per 100 users)
annual benefit from infrastructure and IT staff savings.

In total, these organizations were able to recognize average annual benefits of $5,224 per 100 users
annually (Figure 1) or $2.79 million per year over a three year period.
FIGURE 1
Average Annual Savings
Total (per 100 Users) = $5,224
6,000
$88
5,000
$626
4,000
$1,533
3,000
2,000
$2,977
1,000
0
User
Operations costs
productivity —
search
Operation
margin —
increased
revenue
TCO reduction
Source: IDC, 2014
Increasing User Productivity
The financial benefits being realized by GSA customers all flow to some extent from improvements in
search performance and the impact on user productivity. As Table 2 shows, the GSA enhanced search
in three ways:

Increasing efficiency for search – GSA customers' metrics show that with the GSA they can
find things quicker, more efficiently, and more easily. By finding the answers quicker with the
GSA than they did previously they reduced their time spent for search ranging from as little as
50% up to 96%. One organization reported that previously their search solution was so slow
that a high percent of users abandoned the search altogether. On average their typical search
time dropped from over two minutes to less than one minute (74%).
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
Increasing productivity for search – GSA was able to reduce the percent of searches where the
relevant information was not found by 78% and make search a more reliable method to
answer questions or retrieve data.

Increasing availability of search – by reducing search downtime by 96% GSA customers now
rely on the GSA using search more frequently and with higher expectations of value.
This better, faster access to information empowered the organizations' knowledge workers to impact
their business operations. In the study, 80% of employees were using the GSA.
TABLE 2
Search KPIs
Other
GSA
Time per search (minutes)
2.16
0.56
74%
Percentage of time searching where relevant information is not found
26%
6%
78%
Search downtime incidents per year
3.60
0.14
96%
Net increase of user productivity across organization
% Improvement
1.5%
Source: IDC, 2014
As Figure 2 shows the GSA customers in the study were able to reduce their
annual time spent in search activities from 40 hours per user to less than 10 hours
per user. As a result of delivering more efficient, accurate and reliable search
capabilities GSA was able to add 30.5 hours (40.06 hours related to search for
other search solutions versus 9.53 hours for the GSA) to each user per year and
on average, deliver $1.6 Million ($2,977 per 100 users times the average number
of employees in the organization) in enhanced user productivity for the
organizations interviewed. GSA customers estimated their time savings and the
impact on their productivity. Productivity increases ranged from .1% to 3.6%. On
average they were able to increase the productivity across the entire organization
by 1.5%. As one IT administrator told us, "We have done a lot of projects with
GSA, and it continues to be one our lowest investment, highest ROI technologies."
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"We have done a
lot of projects
with GSA, and it
continues to be
one our lowest
investment,
highest ROI
technologies."
7
FIGURE 2
Lost User Productivity (per User per Year)
45
40
40.06
35
Hours
30
25
20
15
9.53
10
5
0
Other
GSA
Hours for failed search
1.06
0.23
Hours from downtime
3.60
0.14
35.39
9.16
Hours for search
Source: IDC, 2014
Reducing Business Operations Costs
Well over half the companies in the study are using GSA to reduce and better manage operating costs.
Some of the most successful examples are the customer support cases where GSA helped companies
reduce their call center costs in several ways.

Fewer calls – because of self service access to GSA many customers get their questions
answered and do not need to call. Interviewees estimated that their call volumes were down
36% as a result of implementing GSA which had lowered their costs by 210,000 annually.
(Table 3) Many studies have shown that enabling customers in this way also leads to higher
customer satisfaction.

Deflecting emails - One service with nearly 20 million customers had deployed GSA tied to an
email engine creating a call-deflection tool. In response to an initial call, the customer service
agent searches for information relevant to the product or issue and then GSA feeds the email
engine information back to the customer while the customer is on the phone. The email
comprises content and templated information sourced from their internal content management
system information specific to the question as well as links to their public facing websites.
In this way, the call remains short but the customer's issue is resolved on the first call and
follow-up calls are deflected out of contact centers onto online channels. Overall, call center
costs are reduced by 27%, based on a 36% reduction in calls, reduced handling time and a
higher first call resolution rate. Table 3 shows the specifics around Call Center Service
Savings for the customers interviewed.
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
Higher First Call Resolution – On average, companies were able to use GSA to improve their
ability to resolve questions and issues using their first line response in the initial call from 79%
to 85% (Table 3). Better first call resolution means quicker call handling and fewer resources
used. One organization with call centers in Europe is saving over $150,000 per year by
increasing its first call resolution to nearly 100%.
Average call handling time was reduced by 11% from 16.27 minutes to 14.42 minutes when the
organizations interviewed switched to the GSA due to better and more relevant search results by call
center employees.
"Yes, this has improved in the sense that any issues are now dealt purely by first line
support, from our helpdesks in the North of England and Scotland. We don't now have
to involve second line support, which is provided by more expensive resources in
London. So now, it's typically self-resolved by the helpdesk agent … whereas before, it
would have been escalated to second line support, and 2-3 people got involved.
Sometimes it would have been escalated to third line support, which involves more
people developers and technicians."
The combination of these benefits have led to lowering operating costs by 16% while increasing
customer satisfaction by 22%
TABLE 3
Call Center Service Savings
Other
Customer calls per year
Average handling time (minutes)
First-call resolution
Annual time requirements (hours)
GSA
% Improvement
11,129
7,089
36%
16.27
14.42
11%
79%
85%
7%
7,419
4,717
36%
Overall customer satisfaction increase
22%
Source: IDC, 2014
In addition to customer service, other respondents were able to reduce their operations costs using
GSA. A technology company relies on GSA to find information that they need to design new products.
By identifying instances where someone else has already developed a specific piece of technology,
they can save development time by leveraging work already done. They estimate that they are saving
two weeks of labor for each of over 3,000 employees.
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The GSA improves customer service, makes self service more efficient and less frustrating, reduces
the time spent on customer service calls and generally improves the overall customer satisfaction for
an organization that can provide quick relevant answers to users and customers. Internally, the ability
to provide knowledge workers with the information they need to do their job without additional
searching or rework can yield significant benefits as seen in Figure 1.
New Revenue Growth
Seven of thirteen GSA customers interviewed expressed the possibility that GSA had increased
revenue (five other expressed a definite "No"). Companies across all three use cases provided
examples of how they leveraged the information capabilities of GSA to grow their business. New
revenue growth identified during the interviews was tied to one of the following benefits:

Enhancement of business agility driving products to market faster – A manufacturer was able
to speed up time to market on new products by a few days per product across hundreds of
new products each year. By using GSA to search internal files from other projects they were
able to leverage that internal information to shorten the development cycle and get revenue
generating products to market faster.

Enhancement of website capabilities creating more effective conversion rates for customers A financial company was able to use GSA to improve the web site experience for its
prospects. It improved the response to search requests and all but eliminated failed searches.
The result was a nearly 50% increase in hits becoming customers generating millions in new
revenue.
IDC's methodology for combining revenue — a top-line benefit — with cost savings, we have to
eliminate the costs associated with that revenue by applying an operating margin (typically 10-20%),
which starts with an annual revenue benefit of $3.2 million and leaves a realized revenue benefit of
$347,323, or $626 per 100 users (see Table 4). This results in an estimated 1.4% average annual
increase in revenue for the customers where GSA had increased revenue.
TABLE 4
Increased Revenue
Average
Annual revenue increase
$3,277,429
Annual revenue increase percentage
1.4%
Operating margin
10%
Net-new operating profit
$327,743
Operating profit (per 100 users)
$626
Source: IDC, 2014
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Infrastructure Cost Reduction
All of the companies interviewed had search solutions prior to implementing GSA. Some of the
solutions were provided by other vendors and some were home grown – developed in house or
cobbled together from multiple solutions. IDC conducted Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis and
found that on average, the TCO for the GSA was 27% lower with infrastructure savings amounting to
$7,500 or 1-2 servers, and IT labor costs reduced by $39,000 or roughly 40% of a FTE.
ROI ANALYSIS
IDC uses a discounted cash flow methodology to calculate the return on investment and payback
period. ROI is the ratio of the net present value (NPV) and discounted investment. The payback period
is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment.
IDC assessed the cost, benefits, and value of GSA to these companies over a three-year period, as
shown in Figure 3. These companies made average initial investments of $939 per 100 users
(purchase, deployment, consulting and training) and are spending $514 per 100 users each year for
technical support and document administration/tweaking and tagging content. These investments will
result in average annual benefits of $4,718 per 100 users, with customer and user growth increasing
the value of the benefits each year.
FIGURE 3
Cash Benefit Analysis (per 100 Users)
14,000
12,000
$11,673
10,000
8,000
$6,522
($) 6,000
4,000
$5,144
$5,665
$1,823 $3,277
2,000
0
-2,000
$(939)
Initial
$(514)
Year 1
$(514)
Year 2
$(514)
Year 3
Investments
Benefits
Cumulative benefit
Source: IDC, 2014
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The three year ROI analysis (Table 5) shows that on average, the organizations in this study will spend
$2,174 (per 100 users) and achieve $11,113 in benefits (per 100 users). This results in an NPV of
$8,939 (per 100 users) for their use of GSA. Based on these results, the organizations saw an average
payback period of 7.9 months and an ROI of 411%.
TABLE 5
Three-Year ROI Analysis (per 100 Users)
Benefit
$11,113
Investment
$2,174
Net present value
$8,939
ROI = NPV/investment
411%
Payback = investment/ NPV (months)
7.9
Discount rate
12%
Source: IDC, 2014
CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES
The Google Search Appliance is a cost effective and comprehensive tool for organizations that need to
improve the searchability and findability of information across the enterprise. Its flexibility, ease of
installation, customization and use make it a differentiator in the market for enterprise search solutions.
Its APIs and development partners also make it a contender in the market for search-based solutions.
However, the value and opportunity around the use of search-based solutions is still not well
understood by organizations.
Organizations need to be educated on the value and potential ROI of search-based these solutions,
especially in the areas of potential revenue generation. Google should work with its partners and
partner network to advance ROI analysis methods and practices in order to assist their customers and
prospects with developing documentation that substantiates the improvements.
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CONCLUSION
As organizations look to effectively leverage the volume of structured and unstructured data siloed
behind the firewall, they are beginning to realize that discovering, locating and organizing relevant
information is the key to unlocking this value. The GSA provides a flexible, cost effective and
innovative way of unlocking value and building role oriented search-based applications. It offers easy
customization together with search, content analytics, and sophisticated aggregation technologies to
locate and use information to innovate and generate revenue within businesses.
The Google Search Appliance enables IT organizations to more effectively demonstrate their value
proposition while increasing innovation and value for their knowledge workers. Organizations can
simultaneously reduce the efforts and costs associated with traditional enterprise search systems and
improve innovation, functionality, relevance and user happiness by implementing next generation
systems like the Google Search Appliance.
APPENDIX
References
1
Digital Universe Study, April 2014, sponsored by EMC
Process
IDC utilized its standard ROI methodology for this project. This methodology is based on gathering
data from current users of the technology as the foundation for the model. Based on these interviews,
IDC performs a three-step process to calculate the ROI and payback period:
1. Measure the savings from reduced IT costs (staff, hardware, software, maintenance, and IT
support), increased user productivity, and improved revenues over the term of the deployment.
2. Ascertain the investment made in deploying the solution and the associated training and
support costs.
3. Project the costs and savings over a five-year period and calculate the ROI and payback for
the deployed solution.
IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions, which are
summarized below:
1. Time values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and overhead) to
quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings.
2. Downtime values are a product of the number of hours of downtime multiplied by the number
of users affected.
3. The impact of unplanned downtime is quantified in terms of impaired end-user productivity and
lost revenue.
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4. Lost productivity is a product of downtime multiplied by burdened salary.
5. Lost revenue is a product of downtime multiplied by the average revenue generated per hour.
6. The net present value (NPV) of the five-year savings is calculated by subtracting the amount
that would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding a 12%
return to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This accounts for both the assumed cost of
money and the assumed rate of return.
Because every hour of downtime does not equate to a lost hour of productivity or revenue generation,
IDC attributes only a fraction of the result to savings. As part of our assessment, we asked each
company what fraction of downtime hours to use in calculating productivity savings and the reduction
in lost revenue. IDC then taxes the revenue at that rate.
Further, because IT solutions require a deployment period, the full benefits of the solution are not
available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates the benefits on a monthly basis and
then subtracts the deployment time from the first-year savings.
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About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology
markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts
provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in
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