moneysupermarket.com
The UK's leading finance price comparison Web site clicks onto Symantec intelligent archiving platform
By standardising on Symantec Enterprise Vault software - implemented by Phoenix Software - the company is benefitting from a centralised, integrated content archiving solution that pulls corporate data from multiple sources, including the company's Outlook email system, PST files and file servers.
A CONSUMER CHAMPION
moneysupermarket.com is the UK's leading finance price comparison Web site and a leading UK travel price comparison Web site. One of the main aims of the company is to be a consumer champion.
moneysupermarket.com believes that its price comparison services offer a compelling value proposition to both consumers and product providers, simplifying consumers' research, improving consumers' shopping experience, and enabling product providers and advertisers to target their marketing spend effectively. The free online service to consumers enables them to search for and compare a wide range of products across a substantial representation of the relevant market and assists them in finding the product most suited to their requirements.
moneysupermarket.com's revenue comes predominantly from fees paid by providers, advertisers and financial intermediaries. The Group generated revenues of £104.5 million in 2006, reflecting a 54% increase as compared to the previous year.
moneysupermarket.com is little short of a phenomenon. Comparing the financial year ended December 2006 with the previous financial year, the Group Web sites attracted approximately 65 million visitors compared with 39 million visitors, and 43 million transactions compared with 22 million transactions. Expanding from its personal finance origins, moneysupermarket.com currently has 25 product channels (areas) across four verticals. All of which has culminated in the company being floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2007.
Inevitably with this success, there are challenges. Email is the lifeblood of the Group's staff of more than 600 employees, and with such exponential growth moneysupermarket.com needed a cutting edge solution for this business-critical application. It was Neil Edwards' job to find and implement it. As the company's Server Infrastructure Manager he was at the sharp end.
THE NUMBER ONE UK FINANCE PRICE COMPARISON WEB SITE
"The pace of growth at moneysupermarket.com has been fantastic," he says. "We're the number one UK finance price comparison Web site by share of UK Internet visits and in the top five of all business and financial institutions Web sites. Our staff numbers have grown considerably and consequent increased demands on the email system - including PST file store size and personal folders exceeding 2GB - have meant we needed to look to the future and implement a robust, effective solution. We also needed to keep the archive storage - and associated operational costs - under control."
Of course, there was also the compliance issue to consider. Edwards and his team were conscious of the difficulty of aggregating and delivering files, messages or other content for legal scrutiny. Moreover, the company needed to adhere to certain criteria regarding message retention as set out by the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA).
The roots of the relationship with Symantec lie in moneysupermarket.com's deployment of Veritas NetBackup software from Symantec. moneysupermarket.com has been using NetBackup for several years to deliver high performance data protection that scales to protect the company's Windows and Linux environments. The unified data protection solution provides comprehensive protection and meets moneysupermarket.com's backup windows with faster disk-based backups, improved storage utilisation and more flexible disaster recovery.
"It was the success with NetBackup - and its seamless integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault - which convinced us to choose Symantec," says Edwards. "Enterprise Vault was our preferred choice, both in terms of its seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook, and its functionality/ease-of-use."
PHOENIX RISES TO THE CHALLENGE
Phoenix Software played a pivotal role in all of this. As one of the UK's leading suppliers of software and foremost experts in software volume licensing and compliance, Phoenix implemented Enterprise Vault throughout moneysupermarket.com in only three days. "Phoenix was an invaluable resource to have," says Edwards. "They were clearly very experienced in Enterprise Vault and other Symantec solutions and their professionalism was evident throughout the deployment. As we've moved forward, Phoenix has continued to be proactive and committed."
Enterprise Vault provides moneysupermarket.com with a centralised, integrated content archiving solution that pulls corporate data from multiple sources, including the company's Outlook email system, PST files and file servers. moneysupermarket.com has been able to eliminate quotas and message size restrictions and give the 610+ staff users a mailbox of virtually unlimited size - while also controlling message store growth. The solution has also helped reduce the time Edwards and the team spends dealing with mailbox housekeeping. Admin-defined policies automatically archive individual mailbox email and attachments from Exchange into online Enterprise Vault stores.
"Since we deployed Enterprise Vault, our staff headcount has grown from 423 to well over 600 and still climbing. This is an increase of well over 40% but using Enterprise Vault we can still manage this surging demand for email comfortably without any additional resources," says Edwards.
Storage is being optimised too. By reducing the size and overhead of the Exchange data store, moneysupermarket.com is improving the performance of its primary applications and the speed with which the company can protect the underlying data. The smaller data stores are also shrinking backup and recovery times and saving money on storage and storage management.
Enterprise Vault has also helped moneysupermarket.com meet the UK FSA's demanding compliance rules and regulations in this area - not only are all emails securely protected in a cost-effective environment, they can also be retrieved very quickly to meet legal and regulatory compliance requirements. moneysupermarket.com has automated the process of gathering specified content whenever it is needed and is able to monitor its data systematically on an ongoing basis.
"With Symantec Enterprise Vault, moneysupermarket.com comfortably meets the email storage demands of our staff," says Edwards. "We are benefitting from a powerful, flexible and cost effective email archiving platform that will stand the test of time. Since deploying Enterprise Vault 18 months ago, we have not needed to buy any new hardware associated with Exchange or email."
