Global IT business gets up to speed with Google Search Appliance

Posted by Posted by Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware, an international application delivery and security applications provider for virtual and cloud data centers, headquartered in Israel. The company has 10,000 customers across the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Radware, we help over 10,000 companies around the world assess and manage everything from Business Intelligence to Customer Relationship Management to Enterprise Resource Planning. Our customers use our tools as a core part of their strategy for adapting to market challenges, maintaining business continuity and keeping costs down. But navigating these complex products requires our help and support. So we offer a database of over 2,000 Q&As, known as Knowledge Base, to assist in solving different problems, along with telephone and online support.

Until recently, it was a slow process for customers to find what they were looking for in this vast pool of data. If they didn’t type the exact phrase that was listed in the Knowledge Base database, the necessary results would not always appear. We also struggled internally to navigate the search options. Even in my role as Knowledge Base Manager, I sometimes found it quicker to use Google’s regular web search than our own database.

When looking at alternatives, we were blown away by the accuracy and speed of Google’s enterprise search technology, the Google Search Appliance. DoIT International helped us to set up the GSA and now the results of all searches are 400% to 800% faster than before. All results appear in less than a second, compared to the response time of at least 4 seconds with our previous technology. In 70% of the searches, no further queries are performed and there are no 'next page' clicks, so we know people are finding what they need at the top of the page.

We’re confident that our customers are getting the help and support they need in the timeframe they expect. What’s more, we’re using GSA’s analytics to build out our database. If we spot lots of customers searching for the same thing, we add a new result or ‘how to’ guide or use the feedback to identify and address an issue before it has even been officially logged. All thanks to the speed, accuracy and ease of use of the GSA.