U.S. Government
Portal Solution
For a U.S. Government program classified as top secret, Hyperwave' s solutions are a key competitive weapon. That's the reason the sources are not revealed in this case study, even though they feel so strongly about having Hyperwave in their arsenal that they were willing to discuss its benefits anonymously.
We' ve come a long way from document management. Our knowledge is a living and breathing resource for us, and Hyperwave is making it possible."
So good it's confidential
The program had some tough demands-nine gigabytes of textual data on one Web server - as well as a history of bad experience with a document management solution that had to be overcome. "We spent half a million dollars trying to get it to work," he said. But Hyperwave saved the day with an architecture that integrates distributed servers with Web-based technology.
Hyperwave calls it the server pool concept, one of the things that makes its solutions unique in the marketplace. "We have multiple servers around the world. But for our 'customers' in the intelligence community, it looks as if we are one organization." Running on Windows NT today and in the next phase Solaris (exclusively), Hyperwave lets those customers store and access files that are primarily PDF, HTML and XML, as well as MPEG 2 video files, PowerPoint 3.0 and other multimedia formats.
10-second worldwide searches
Frankly, the organization didn't think it would be possible to synchronize servers around the world, but Hyperwave made it happen. "We can search all our sites - wherever they are - and get an answer in less than 10 seconds. That's pretty impressive, especially given the time-sensitive nature of our work. If you put a query in for information and it takes three minutes to arrive, you might as well be using carrier pigeons."
With Hyperwave, the organization has gained all the advantages of a single-server architecture, with none of the drawbacks, and there are many for a unit this size - the bottlenecks, the inflexibility, and the security risks involved when all your knowledge "eggs" are in one basket.
Easy content management, big savings
Hyperwave makes it easy to manage the distributed knowledge base. That means huge savings. "We're saving thousands of man-hours in Web management alone. That's real ROI. Where Hyperwave really pays dividends is if you're a distributed company, trying to tie together servers in multiple locations and handle all the link management involved. There's no other product on the market that does this as well." He also appreciates the ease of administration Hyperwave offers.
There's a Web front end for administration, which is another nice feature. I'm seeing all the Hyperwave servers around the world from my desk.
In addition, Hyperwave has been easy to customize when the organization has had certain unique requirements that went beyond the Hyperwave Information Server's base functionality. The only programming language engineers need to know is Java Script."
Another showstopper: metadata searches
Hyperwave frees the organization's users from having to plow through tens of thousands of hits of information on a particular subject by analyzing the context of the information and relating it directly to the needs of the user. "That was a huge showstopper for us when we were evaluating solutions." Through Hyperwave, administrators assign particular attributes to documents based on the functional role of a given user, so that users will only see content pertinent to their function or current role. "We've got community standards for every piece of data that goes into the Web server. That's what we use to find things, and it's one of the features that makes possible the kind of knowledge management our organization requires. Instead of getting 60,000 hits on a query, I only get the ones that are relevant to me, and the relevance of that information is ranked."
The source of the information is another valuable attribute that Hyperwave lets you assign to a document. "One of the challenges our 'customers' have when they want information is knowing who to ask. Who do you believe? Who's the authoritative source? It's data currency, and it's a real issue for us that Hyperwave helps us solve. We've got to make sure we've got the right data, and Hyperwave makes it possible through version control features that provide instant information about ownership, time stamps and version histories."
Living, breathing knowledge
With Hyperwave, users can even locate the experts on a given topic (by clicking on the "Find Expert" button), and open a chat session with them if they are online. Or if they acquire new information on a topic while on assignment, they can log in to the system and easily change their assessment of what they know, so it's immediately available to other users through a logical, easy-to-use portal.
Hyperwave is the ideal portal solution for us. Our product is information-tracking worldwide intelligence and promoting that intelligence to our people via the Internet. We needed a distributed object-based system that could manage objects across a wide area network and get us out of the hyperlink maintenance business.