AstraZeneca's CTO office has implemented an agile app store and a real-time search engine, Sinequa, to enhance access to scientific information for over 10,000 users, enabling rapid application development across business functions. The initiative aims to consolidate structured and unstructured information, improving collaboration and efficiency through intuitive search-based applications. With over 180 million documents indexed, the new global enterprise search facilitates connections among employees and supports innovative processes within the company.

1. Search at AstraZeneca
Rob Hernandez
Technology Incubation Lab, CTO Office
An Agile AppStore On A Rich Search Index

2. AstraZeneca
IT Innovation
AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company with R&D at its core. Our business is
providing innovative, effective medicines that make a real difference to patients.
CTO office creates competitive advantage through innovative use of technology, whilst
increasing value of existing IT investments. As part of the UK tech incubation lab, we
Access latest technologies to help drive a
disruptive culture across AstraZeneca customers
Nurture ideas that deliver immediate value to
the business, leading to step-change adoption
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2
3
Create a environment to incubate innovative ideas,
safely accelerating closely with the business

3. 3
Structured
Unstructured
Information at AstraZeneca
Good access is key
Knowledge
Information
Data
Patents
Vision: Make our information accessible and useful by bring it together in 1 system.
Internal Doc. stores
External Information
Cloud based stores
Focus on
unstructured &
semi-structured.

4. 4 Author | 00 Month Year Set area descriptor | Sub level 1
“We already have
enterprise search”
“Just get me Google !”
“What’s the
value?”
“You can’t access our
document store”
“I’m not sure about
putting my data on the
cloud?”
“Can I trust it’s secure?”“Yet another Search
engine?”
“Search is solved”
The New Search
The journey we faced

5. Search Big Data Engine
Enables Scientific Intelligence
In 100 days we implemented Sinequa real-time search engine within R&D
for 10k users. Covering all scientific information and core internal
repositories.
Today, we have over 180 million documents, searchable sub-second
with key scientific vocabularies (SciBite) automatically tagged and findable
Competitive
Intelligence App

6. Building Business Apps
Drives Innovation
R&D Intelligence
R&D News AlertsR&D ChemSearch
Find Scientific Partners Mobile Apps
Find People at AZ
The real revolution is that very complex business
processes can delivered through intuitive search-based
applications.
We built over 10 applications in the first 3 months.
We now support applications across all business
functions.

7. Building Business Apps
Drives Innovation
R&D Intelligence
R&D News AlertsR&D ChemSearch
Find Scientific Partners Mobile Apps
Find People at AZ
The real revolution is that very complex business
processes can delivered through intuitive search-based
applications.
We built over 10 applications in the first 3 months.
We now support applications across all business
functions.
Sentence level connections across all our
documents

8. From PoC to Enterprise
Social Collaboration
With 12 months experience of Sinequa, we developed a new global Enterprise Search in 8 weeks
and launched as part of the new portal, Nucleus. Now has 60k users with multi-language support.
Search enables us to socialise key
findings from news & documents,
but also chatter, applications,
people and scientific tags – helping
to connect people together.
Already in pre-production,
indexation of all of our cloud
repositories (Box, Sharepoint,
Veeva etc)

9. 9 Author | 00 Month Year Set area descriptor | Sub level 1
“Wow , news on my
mobile!”
“Can we use this
info in our app?”
"In all my years, I have never
been able to find the data until
now"
“This is a game changer”
“I see how this can help make
us a $50B company“
“Impressive! An AZ search engine that brings back
documents that are useful.”
“Can we use this
search for our
application”

10. Our team includes partners from Infosys, PebbleCode & Sinequa.
Thanks to…
The Team
And thanks to... Youssef Belghali, Susan Donohoe, Nasko Radev, Mark Durrant, John
Mildenhall, Tak Tran, Simon White, Akshay Tankhiwale.
Nick Brown Rob Hernandez
Tim Bell (Sinequa) Christian Sestier(Sinequa)
Steve Woodward Sunny Advani