3i Unifies Collective Knowledge With Coveo Search to Support Fast and Accurate Decision-Making

SAN MATEO, CA, and QUEBEC CITY, QC--(Marketwired - March 31, 2015) - Coveo today announced that 3i, a leading international investment manager focused on mid-market private equity, infrastructure and debt management, is using Coveo Enterprise Search technology to increase the speed of access to deal-related knowledge by 90% and reduce the staff and resources required to respond to compliance requests by 20%. Employee response to the new way of working with Coveo was immediate and positive, with one finance professional saying, "It has revolutionized my life." 

Listed on the London Stock Exchange since 1994 with almost £13 billion of assets under management, 3i is part of the FTSE 100 and has 270 employees working out of 9 offices across Europe, Asia, and North America. To support its global business, 3i had developed an IT infrastructure anchored by a broad portfolio of systems and infrastructure, including Microsoft SharePoint and Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Exchange, File Shares, Active Directory and several databases.

The systems contain a wide array of information about past and current transactions, including deal sites hosted on SharePoint, email communications residing in MS Exchange, the firm's archived content residing in Symantec Enterprise Vault, and a wide variety of documents and presentations in 3i's corporate file share. Over time, the volume of content in these systems proliferated, with file share content and email volume growing at 27% and 17% per year, respectively, making it challenging for employees to find relevant information across multiple systems.

"We decided we needed to upgrade the search experience to ensure that our investment professionals and employees could swiftly find the information and content they needed to improve analysis and decision-making," says Jon Page, Global IT Applications Manager at 3i.

3i went to market for an enterprise search solution with several key capabilities in mind, including:

• An interface editor that enables search interfaces to be easily integrated in multiple systems
• Enterprise-class security to honor user and document-level security across all systems
• Text analytics to automatically add metadata to content to make it more findable by end users.
• Actionable usage analytics to understand user search behavior, content gaps and results relevance.

The team selected Coveo Enterprise Search after considering FAST Search for SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance. "Coveo's speed of deployment was superior to its competitors," Page said. "We were amazed at how things could be done in hours instead of days or weeks. For example, we were surprised at how quickly it was to implement the indexes, search interfaces and customer refiners that we wanted with Coveo."