© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

How do you deploy an online community that reflects a new brand that you are in the middle of developing? Select the right platform, leverage people who have done it before, have the solution hosted to mitigate risk, and collaborate closelywith stakeholders.

NetApp is an industry-leading provider of storage and data management solutions. It has a presence in over 100 countries, thousands of customers, and a culture of innovation, technology leadership, and customer success. NetApp solutions deliver value, speed, and efficiency to their customers; and its web experience includes a network of over 2,200 partners.

Building a connected brand with Social Business Software

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© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

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Brand awareness by connecting employees, customers, and partnersIn late 2007 NetApp started a branding initiative with three primary objectives:

• Clearly communicate who they are and what they do

• Reach beyond existing customers and traditional technology audiences

• Collaborate on an on-going basis with employees, partners, and customers

NetApp conducted extensive studies and surveyed thousands of customers, partners, and technology experts. The majority of respondents stated that they wanted an interactive community to facilitate the sharing of knowledge around product, technology, and business concerns.

The launch of the new brand was scheduled for March of 2008 through a global campaign that included major advertising and a redesigned website.

One portion of the redesigned website and branding effort included the creation of an online community. Due to the initiative’s aggressive schedule, NetApp needed a comprehensive community platform that could easily match the company’s new branding efforts. NetApp expected the following benefi ts from its community offering:

• Accelerate the branding initiative

• Enable technical discussions and collaboration

• Connect global teams and user groups

• Centralize access to documentation

• Leverage Web 2.0 technologies in the NetApp web experience

“Engaging in active online conversations across the enterprise value chain is a must for any brand that wants to be relevant and competitive.”

Tracy Hansen, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, NetApp

Key highlights

Industry: Technology

Business opportunity: Building a connected brand—employees, customers, partners, experts

Solution: Jive Social Business Software powers the NetApp Community

Results and benefi ts: Thousands of community members across 100 countries. Exceeded adoption expectations by 1,200%. Accelerated global branding initiative.

© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

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Why Jive?NetApp chose Jive for the following reasons:

• Ease of use ensuring rapid adoption: “People will not participate if it’s not super intuitive.”

• Integrated Web 2.0 technologies: one-stop shop for wikis, blogs, discussions, and people

• Flexible platform: reflects the NetApp brand and seamlessly integrates NetApp’s web experience

• Open API to integrate with other systems: critical for single sign-on (SSO) requirements

To accelerate the implementation, NetApp decided to have the community fully hosted by Jive. The utilization of experienced consultants from Jive further accelerated the deployment of the community. Meanwhile, NetApp used Jive internally to collaborate on the development of the new brand.

NetApp community statsCommunity adoption and participation far exceeded NetApp’s expectations:

• Over 9,000 registered users from 100 countries around the world in 8 months

• 78% of community users are external (customers, partners, technology experts)

• Over 900 discussions

• Over 50,000 views of popular discussions and documents

Key ingredients for community successTo ensure the success and adoption of the community, NetApp focused on four key areas:

• Executive sponsorship: to make embracing the community part of the company culture.

• Forum moderators and content creators: to provide exceptional thought leadership (this is not a level-one support function).

• Dedicated community manager: to constantly monitor and feed the needs of the community and to quickly identify and exploit new opportunities.

• Monitoring: to ensure that open questions get answered and escalated if necessary.

“It took two months to go live instead of the six months we planned. Jive’s hosting and professional services played a key role in the accelerated deployment.”

John Summers, Community Manager, NetApp

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jive software 325 lytton avenue, palo alto, ca 94301 o 1.877.495.3700 f 1.503.961.1047 + 1.503.972.6143

Jive. First in Social Business.Jive is the largest and fastest-growing independent Social Business Software company in the world.

For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com.

Jive at workNetApp employees continue to post a large volume of critical content and answer both technical and business questions. Users and competitive partners are helping each other succeed in their NetApp deployments. And NetApp’s community is helping to deliver upon the objectives of the company’s branding initiative:

• Engaged a broader audience in both technical and business discussions

• Expanded brand awareness and loyalty

• Tapped into a much richer pool of ideas that help drive company and product priorities

This is possible thanks to the ability of the NetApp community to:

• Connect people—customers, partners, and employees

• Engage in discussions and support user groups

• Share information—best practices, documentation, code, downloads

• Share news—company, products, events

• Solve problems—leverage the community of experts to answer questions

• Spawn on-going discussions from newsletter articles (instead of one-way communications)

• Establish a forum for customers and partners to continually provide feedback

What’s next?Building on the initial community success, NetApp has now deployed both a successful support community as well as an internal collaboration community called NetApp Live. Additional areas of future community growth include building collaborative workspaces for partners and expanding the community to include partner-specific discussion areas.

“WOW…what an outstanding answer. Adam, I am very appreciative of this detailed answer. It really addresses my question perfectly. Thanks for taking the time to answer so well. ”

Steve, NetApp Community Member

“Community adoption and activity has exceeded our expectations by 1,200%.”

Carrie Rushing, Sr. Manager of Corporate Marketing, NetApp