Case Study: Red Hat achieves 91% licensing cost savings and improved search relevancy with Lucidworks Fusion

How Red Hat Cut Costs and Improved Relevancy with Lucidworks Fusion

Red Hat, a leading provider of open source enterprise software used by most Fortune 1000 companies, faced rapidly rising search licensing costs and declining search relevance as its customer portal grew to millions of documents, product docs, forums and a large knowledgebase. The existing Google Search Appliance limited customization, couldn’t serve as a content-browsing platform, and delivered click-through rates around 24%, prompting Red Hat to seek an open-source solution.

Red Hat implemented Lucidworks Fusion (built on Apache Solr) across its Customer Portal and main site, enabling fast indexing, advanced relevancy tuning and scalable search services. The move cut licensing costs by 91%, increased daily click-throughs from 24% to 58% (a 212% uplift), supported a four-node cluster indexing ~13 million documents, served ~1M monthly visitors, and helped customers self-resolve—reducing support tickets by about 50,000.

Red Hat

Andrew Hecox

Manager, Software Engineering