2010
2010 Winner Profile
NetApp
- Project Description: Looking for areas in which to cut costs, NetApp focused on the live seminars it uses to train its 900 internal and 4,000 external-partner sales engineers. In the past, the company organized live events, where its experts would fly worldwide to put on more than 90 sessions on the company's nearly 200 products. To save money, the company created vSearch, a platform for archiving sales presentations and meetings, and storing video of meetings synchronized with slides and a verbatim transcript. The entire collection is made available to internal sales staff, and a smaller portion of it is available to partners. The cloud-based system uses a remote-learning architecture solution from Altus and streaming from Akamai. The sales-video database is entirely searchable using words in the transcript that are indexed to specific points in the video. In the past year, NetApp cut travel budgets, but the company was still able to train partners using the system, resulting in cost savings of up to 90 percent over live meetings.
- Project type: Web 2.0, Web Productivity
- Business Functions: Sales
- Business Goal: Strategic/Competitive Advantage
- CIO: Marina Levinson, CIO
- CEO: Tom Georgeons, President & CEO
- Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
- Industry: Computer Hardware
- Revenue (2009): $3.53 billion
- Website: www.netapp.com
