After reading Sid’s first entry on the Attivio blog, I was quick to draw the parallel to the current presidential election, where the willingness to change and the experience to do the job are often presented as two distinct choices. With Sid’s leadership, Attivio has delivered a third release of our core platform, the Active Intelligence Engine or AIE, within the first 12 months of operations. Is this based on a desire to change or as a result of experience? The answer is both.

In the case of Attivio, our vision is based on deliberately building a team with years of experience in delivering information access, business intelligence, and database solutions. We learned that the challenges around these application categories are growing, while legacy technology providers are struggling to keep up. Even the smallest organizations now have an amazing amount of data and content, but do not have the technology or processes to collect, integrate, retrieve, query and analyze their information resources. In addition, serving customers and employees through a multi-channel strategy is critical to more and more organizations, which creates additional data and organizational complexity.

In order to meet these challenges, we decided to think completely out of the box, while remembering the pains and challenges that exist for organizations with legacy implementations. We did not want to create another solution that may solve your current problem, only to create new issues to deal with in the future.

We at Attivio believe that legacy software is the root cause for many unhappy organizations with unfinished implementations. Search is not enough; content management is not enough; business intelligence and performance management are not enough. There needs to be something new.

This belief in change is based on our years of experience in the trenches, working with customers and partners trying to make yesterday’s technologies solve the business challenges of today and tomorrow. Let me assure you: we have many scars from trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. At some point we said, “Let’s stop that.” AIE is based on deep experience and blood, sweat and tears. Attivio’s team and partners have implemented hundreds of portals and analytic applications over the years. As a result of these experiences, we could no longer accept or promote the status quo.

As the CEO of Attivio, I am often asked why we took the chance of creating this new discipline called “Active Intelligence”. I always have the same answer: we had no choice. The bi-polar nature of any information infrastructure (structured data and unstructured content working together about as well as South Korea and North Korea) required a fresh view. We felt that our customers and partners were asking us to solve complex problems, asking for true business insight and requiring a much faster speed of deployment. We did not see a path to do this by simply adopting and slightly improving what legacy enterprise search or data warehouses were doing.

We aren’t the only ones who are changing the game. I see several other companies popping up with experienced teams that have a passion to change the status quo. We hope there will be more passionate and persistent players joining the fray. This will mean a new breed of software companies that represent what customers and partners actually want. Over the next several months and years, I will make sure to use this blog to discuss our customers’ and partners’ requirements and how Attivio plans to meet them.

Thanks to our great investors and our experienced team, we are committed to changing the status quo… one client and partner at a time. The choice isn’t change or experience. The choice should be change based on deep experience and a clear understanding of what hasn’t worked in the past.

Ali Riaz, CEO

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