NetApp Expands Enterprise Search with Kapow Software

Delivering a search experience that is comprehensive in its scope yet provides accurate and relevant results is a delicate balancing act. NetApp expanded enterprise search capabilities with Kofax Kapow™, a solution that resulted in 80% more functionality.

NetApp creates innovative storage systems and software solutions that help customers around the world store, manage, protect and retain one of their most precious corporate assets—their data.

NetApp was looking to deploy an enterprise search solution that would allow customers to find critical customer service information. By doing so, NetApp wanted to achieve two goals: to greatly reduce customer reliance on costly and inefficient phone-based support and to enable customers to easily locate the answers to their support questions online. Implementing an enterprise search solution would give NetApp a rare opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost.

The project required access to new and legacy content in distributed repositories across the organization—support communities, bugs database, case notes, intranet sites, mailing list archives, etc. Additionally, much of the content had limited, non-standard metadata or none at all. The difficulty of accessing all of the content, combined with the poor state of the metadata made the prospect of a successful search implementation slim.

They needed a solution that was robust and flexible—enabling NetApp to automate and perform the following functions:

• Access multiple systems, each containing critical content
• Add, enhance, transform and normalize metadata
• Deliver a fully enriched feed to an enterprise search engine

In addition, NetApp needed to enforce a stringent access control policy. Users of the system—employees, partners, customers and guest users—could only be able to access the content they were authorized to view.

Kapow was chosen as the solution. Kapow rapidly extracts content from all of the relevant sources, enhances the metadata using automated business logic and feeds the content to NetApp’s search appliance.

In its search initiative, NetApp was able to include all of the valuable 1 million+ content items residing in 150 repositories. Additionally, the content is delivered to the search appliance with fully enriched metadata, ensuring the best and most secure results.

The entire project came in at 50% of its initial estimated cost, yet provided 80% more functionality. Most importantly, NetApp enabled their customers to use online search to answer their support questions on an on-demand basis. The content needed was precisely delivered.