Advanced Enterprise Search Case Study: National Instruments Challenge: Migrate from FAST to a Future-­‐Proof Enterprise Search Platform National Instruments was concerned about the future state of its enterprise search solution. Microsoft’s FAST ESP was no longer offered as a stand-­‐alone product and was marked for end-­‐of-­‐life effective July 2013. “It was clear to us that remaining with FAST ESP was not a viable option,” said Kenn North, Senior Product Manager-­‐Search for National Instruments (NI). Customer Profile: Since 1976, National Instruments (NASDAQ: NATI) has equipped engineers and scientists with innovative computer-­‐based products that accelerate productivity, innovation, and discovery. The company has more than 6,800 employees. After a competitive multi-­‐vendor review, NI chose Attivio as the company’s new advanced enterprise search platform, to power its site search including eCommerce, Intranet and CRM search. Key Challenge: The NI team chose Attivio to provide important new functionality and resolve other technical pain points. AIE enabled the company to meet strategic objectives, including: Replace the company’s legacy FAST ESP search, marked for end-­‐of-­‐life in July 2013, with a new advanced enterprise platform capable of powering its .com, .shop, Intranet and CRM search, while also providing key functionality missing from FAST ESP. •
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Providing site visitors with a more engaging search experience Optimizing customers’ online shopping experience to increase revenue Providing highly personalized information to NI’s global workforce Improving sales and marketing reporting and forecasting Mega-­‐Vendors Rejected Early in the Evaluation Process: The NI review team eliminated a number of potential vendors because other large companies had acquired them recently. “We have no idea what’s in store for these acquired technologies, long term or even short term,” said North. “We also found a number of them to be ‘big iron’ vendors, requiring huge hardware footprints.” NI also reviewed a proposal to migrate to SharePoint, with SQL Server and the .NET framework. This too was rejected quickly. “We’re a Java shop,” said North. Our search and web developers use Java and Linux.” “Attivio offered the quickest path to gaining key functions missing in FAST ESP and mostly lacking in LucidWorks/Solr out of the box.” – Kenn North Senior Product Manager, Search National Instruments Superior Functionality and Cost-­‐Benefit Over Open-­‐Source Options: NI’s vendor review team then turned to Attivio and LucidWorks/Solr. “Although we have significant in-­‐house Solr technical resources, we still found Attivio AIE offered a superior cost-­‐benefit profile and much faster time to market, which was a key consideration,” said North. North explained that Attivio AIE was particularly strong in urgently needed features, including: •
Global language support. As a global company, NI placed high value on Attivio’s in-­‐depth global language processing. “Attivio will improve our search experience around the world, especially for our Chinese, Japanese and Korean-­‐based customers,” said North. “LucidWorks/Solr, on the other hand, would have required purchasing language modules separately and integrating them on our own.” •
Ontology-­‐driven type-­‐ahead/‘do you mean’ query completion. “We are very eager to bring this capability to our ni.com site search, including Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072 info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com eCommerce,” said North. “Doing so effectively requires strong multi-­‐ language dictionary support, where Attivio once again stands out.” “We concluded Attivio was the best choice to provide important new functionality and resolve technical pain points, helping us achieve a new level of business success more quickly.” – Kenn North Senior Product Manager, Search National Instruments •
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Reliable, tunable relevancy. “Attivio offers many more out-­‐of-­‐the-­‐box relevancy capabilities than open-­‐source, which would require a lot of internal development,” said North. “And with our previous solution, business rules to boost relevancy might sometimes stop working for no apparent reason.” •
Eliminate “flattening” of data. FAST ESP and all the other vendors reviewed by NI must flatten databases in order to ingest them, degrading their analytic value. For example, North explained, “Our CRM data often includes several contact names for a given customer, but we were limited to just one contact name due to data flattening. Also, if our sales department revised sales territories, we’d have to reload large databases (6 to 7 million records) to reflect those changes. Attivio does not require the flattening of data and will alleviate these issues.” Attivio retains the relational aspects of ingested data and uses a patented JOIN operator to freely correlate and present all related structured data and/or unstructured content. No advance data modeling or pre-­‐joining of information is required. No other solution matched the depth and breadth of Attivio’s correlation functionality. •
Connectivity to a variety of content types. “Attivio provides us with connectivity to sources missing from FAST ESP, particularly JIVE and Confluence,” said North. “Attivio also offers far deeper functionality than LucidWorks/Solr with its framework of dynamic workflows and transformers to enrich content in many ways, including new metadata.” “The Future-­‐Proof Enterprise Search Platform We’ve Been Seeking”: NI’s security needs will vary for external site search for visitors and logged-­‐in users and internal CRM and Intranet search. “Attivio’s Active Security framework will meet our future needs with its flexible approach to user security,” North said. Attivio will enforce user permissions ingested from LDAP, AD, LDS, as well as security information within JIVE and Confluence. Attivio’s Active Security, easily-­‐managed system administration, attentive support, high-­‐quality documentation, active product roadmap and depth of key new functionality led NI to conclude Attivio was the future-­‐proof advanced enterprise search platform it had been looking for. © 2015 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved. Attivio and all other related logos and product names are registered trademarks of Attivio. All other company, product, and service names are the property of their respective holders. “Our review confirmed Attivio offered the quickest path to gaining the critical functionality we wanted, in an agile, future-­‐proof platform, with a cost-­‐ benefit profile superior to other vendors – including open source options,” said North. Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072 info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com