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Monday, August 17, 2009 InfoToday.com

Since its launch 18 months ago, Attivio, Inc. (www.attivio.com) has touted its fresh approach to unified information access. The company's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) combines unstructured content-such as emails, documents, images, and webpages-with structured business data and makes it all searchable. The just-released AIE v1.5 introduces optional modules for Classification, Sentiment, and OCR, as well as some significant new features including high-availability ingestion and querying, guaranteed indexing, and next-generation security. The company has been scoring some significant customer wins for AIE of late, and the enhancements in this version represent what CTO Sid Probstein calls "customer driven innovation."

The enhanced security in AIE 1.5 might be the most significant addition. Probstein says, "It's common to talk about ‘next-generation' in this industry, but now I'm more convinced this [enhanced security] is it." He says AIE's new model brings the database approach of using separate tables into the search world. AIE 1.5 eliminates the need for an enterprise search engine plus a relational database to manage complex document-level permissioning by storing content, groups, and users as separate tables in its universal index. Probstein says this allows significant cost savings and near-real-time access control updates because there is no need to reindex as changes occur.

"In information management, there is a delicate and difficult balance between providing users with access to the information they need while still protecting the integrity of the data. Organizations are often faced with a dual challenge: they need to empower users to have immediate access to the most relevant information, but also need to ensure only those users with certain privileges or permissions are allowed to access it," says Mark Beyer, research VP at Gartner, Inc.

Brian Babineau, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group (www.enterprisestrategygroup.com), says, "The ‘administrative' as opposed to the ‘feature' enhancements are probably the most noteworthy additions to the solution. The multi-node configuration support, the backup and restore utility, and the security model are not the sexiest announcements, but these make it much easier for large enterprises to run and rely on this particular solution. And, our research shows that the easiest way for any technology buyer to justify an investment is to prove operational cost savings-these capabilities do that. Any application that users need to do their jobs-of which enterprise is usually one of-must be available at all times, and with privacy regulations in abundance, security is not a luxury. If I were to single one of these out, it would be the security model, which enables customers to easily update access permissions in real-time without requiring a re-index operation-a process that can take a very long time."

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