Wyeth

Success Story

Fortune 200 company successfully pilots GroupWise 6.5 to leverage new productivity features while maintaining a low cost of ownership

Overview

Wyeth is one of the world's largest research-driven pharmaceutical and health care products companies with 52,000 employees and revenues of $14.5 billion. Wyeth is a leader in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, biotechnology products, and nonprescription medicines that improve the quality of life for people worldwide. The company has some of the world's best-known consumer health care brands, including Advil*, Centrum* and Robitussin*.

Challenge

As a Fortune 200 company with 43,000 e-mail users worldwide, Wyeth is experiencing an exploding volume of e-mail, including an increasing amount of junk mail. The company has a significant amount of confidential information and intellectual assets, making security a top concern. In addition, the FDA and other regulatory agencies require the company to retain information for long periods of time.

Many Wyeth employees typically receive 50-100 e-mails a day and were finding it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to manage large amounts of e-mail, along with unwanted junk mail. Employees needed a better interface to help organize, personalize and prioritize their e-mail to improve response time and overall efficiency.

Novell solution

"We determined that the total cost of ownership with Novell GroupWise is lower than that of other alternatives. A major analyst firm estimated that it would have cost in excess of $30 million and multiple years to convert to another platform. We were also concerned about a decrease in stability and an increase in business costs from virus attacks."

Roger Leone
Vice President
Wyeth Information Services Technology

After re-evaluating e-mail vendor solutions, Wyeth reconfirmed continuation of Novell GroupWise as its messaging platform.

"We determined that the total cost of ownership with Novell GroupWise is lower than that of other alternatives," said Roger Leone, Vice President, Wyeth Information Services Technology. "A major analyst firm estimated that it would have cost in excess of $30 million and multiple years to convert to another platform. We were also concerned about a decrease in stability and an increase in business costs from virus attacks."

As an existing GroupWise customer, Wyeth found the version 6.5 upgrade easier than previous upgrades. As part of its Early Adopter agreement with Novell, a team of Wyeth Information Services employees successfully upgraded 1,400 pilot participants across four continents using five different languages. Technical training was delivered remotely to all sites, significantly reducing demands on technical staff and travel costs.

Wyeth pilot users are already experiencing increased productivity from GroupWise 6.5. The checklist feature helps clients prioritize tasks to be more efficient, and personalized subject lines help them find information faster. With new junk mail handling, clients have significantly decreased the amount of unwanted mail.

"We conducted several focus groups with our clients during the pilot and the feedback for GroupWise 6.5 was uniformly positive," said Leone. "Our clients are finding the new interface more intuitive, and they are seeing a dramatic decrease in junk mail. One executive claimed he went from 40 junk mail messages a day to three in the first few days. The new color-coded categories are enabling clients to easily classify and identify e-mails that are urgent, require follow-up, and so forth. Our Novell support team has been very helpful with both working through support issues and helping us take advantage of the technology."

Results

Given the success of the Early Adopter pilot, Wyeth is now moving forward aggressively with a global upgrade to GroupWise 6.5. The company anticipates that the upgrade will significantly improve user productivity with new features that will enable clients to organize large amounts of e-mail and keep junk mail under control.