National Instruments was concerned about the future state of its enterprise search solution. Microsoft’s FAST ESP is no longer being actively developed as a stand-alone product and has been 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).

1. 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
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 is no longer being actively developed as
a stand-alone product and has been 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).
After a competitive multi-vendor review, NI chose Attivio’s Active Intelligence
Engine® (AIE®) as the company’s new advanced enterprise search platform, to
power its site search including eCommerce, Intranet and CRM search.
The NI team chose Attivio AIE to provide important new functionality and
resolve other technical pain points. AIE enabled the company to meet
strategic objectives, including:
 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 they had recently been
acquired by other large companies. “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.”
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 AIE 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
Advanced Enterprise Search Case Study:
National Instruments
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.
Key Challenge:
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.
“Attivio AIE offered
the quickest path to
gaining key function-
ality missing in FAST
ESP and mostly lacking
in LucidWorks/ Solr
out of the box.”
– Kenn North
Senior Product Manager, Search
National Instruments

2. 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 AIE once again stands out.”
 Auto-categorization, including entity-level sentiment analysis.
 Reliable, tunable relevancy. “Attivio AIE 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 system,
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, which
degrades 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 AIE
does not require the flattening of data and will alleviate these issues.”
Attivio AIE 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 JOIN functionality.
 Connectivity to a variety of content types. “Attivio AIE provides us with
connectivity to sources missing from FAST ESP, particularly JIVE and
Confluence,” said North. “Attivio AIE 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 Looking For”: 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. AIE 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 AIE was the future-proof
advanced enterprise search platform it had been looking for.
“Our review confirmed Attivio AIE 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.
© 2013 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved. Attivio,
Active Intelligence Engine, 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.
“We concluded Attivio
AIE 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