Attivio, Exalead and the new 'search' market

March 4, 2009, 451Group Blog, Nick Patience

I had a very interesting conversation with Attivio recently. Most of it is confidential and thus not enough for me to wrote a full 451 report on it yet (but I will as soon as we're able to), but I can say that the startup founded mostly by former employees of FAST Search & Transfer that has a couple of public customers has some much more interesting news coming down the pike in coming months. It just announced one of these customers, here.

We talked about what is triggering the customer wins it is getting and one thing stood out; the key value prop Attivio has been focused on from the start, which is the conjoining of structured and unstructured data. But it's not just about having access to both types (that was possibly years ago and anyway there's myriad types between those two simplistic and oft-confused descriptions, but bear with me). And it's not just the ability be able to query them both; that too has been done, but crucially with different tools in the past.

It's the ability to switch between both based on what the user is doing - not based on what type of data is being queried - to do so without the user knowing and having a single API for access to both types. And that, say the Attivio team, is hitting home with customers.

Click here to read the 451Group Blog article about Attivio and Unified Information Access