Unified Information Access Blog

Welcome to Attivio's Unified Information Access Blog. Join us for discussions on topics ranging from enterprise search solutions, information access insights, Agile software development methodology to programming with Java. We hope you'll find the articles informative and participate in the discussions by leaving a comment.

The last few years have brought significant changes in the enterprise search market. Acquisitions, redirected strategies and discontinued products have altered the landscape, but the most dramatic development is the emergence of a new class of technology, unified information access (UIA), which combines the best of search and database applications. This article details the top reasons our customers have upgraded their legacy search technology and why selecting UIA is the optimal approach to expand your information access capabilities.

Top 10 Reasons Replace Enterprise Search with UIA:

1. Current search solution is too expensive

It's not just the license and the required number of servers or appliances, it's the ongoing operational costs, the added fees for expanding document volume and servers, and the consultants required for long implementation, tuning and upgrade phases. And for all the expense, the results aren't that impressive either.

Why UIA is better: Spend less, get more

Although we can't speak for other UIA products, Attivio's UIA platform delivers better results at a lower total cost of ownership. The lower cost includes:

  • Dramatically faster development and deployment time, so lower fees for professional services and faster time to value

  • No requirement for taxonomy or manual facet development

  • Smaller number of servers required because of a combination of optimized ingestion and query performance (you can simultaneously ingest 100M documents while maintaining 20-40 QPS with query delays of no more than 2 seconds — try achieving that on one server with a legacy search engine)

  • Ability to add servers and new data formats without re-indexing

2. Current search solution doesn't scale easily

There's got to be an easier way to add new content sources, more servers, more navigation options without having to re-index. Changes are disruptive and expensive, often discouraging expansion and innovation.

Why UIA is better: UIA from Attivio scales seamlessly

Why guess what your needs will be later and buy all the hardware now? With Attivio AIE, there's no need to plan future expansion and invest in hardware upfront because AIE scales incrementally - and without disruptive re-indexing for additional hardware or data formats.


Last year my colleague Jonathan Young wrote a blog post Untangling the Semantic Web: Finding Threads of Gold, in which he noted that "Although the semantic web sounds like a panacea in theory, it does not have a great track record in practice."

At least one reader took this to mean we don't find the core problem interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth! A plurality of our customers and partners place great value on understanding and discovering entities and the relationships between them. Jonathan goes on to explain this later in his post - "...in designing [AIE] we picked a few of the golden threads from the semantic web and combined them with a number of techniques which have been shown to improve the search experience". Some of the relevant capabilities include:

  • Dictionary and statistical named entity extraction in multiple languages

  • Regular expression extraction of any pattern, including common natural language templates like "Sid Probstein is the CTO of Attivio"; you can combine named entity discovery with other search, e.g., find the term "Attivio" near a person entity, etc...

  • Relationship modeling, e.g., friend-of-a-friend, using our query-side JOIN() operator.


This past week I attended the Enterprise Search Summit (ESS) in New York City. It was, as usual, a terrific conference, filled with interesting people and ideas. One particular highlight was the SearchDev.org dinner, hosted by New Idea Engineering (and sponsored by Attivio). I particularly enjoyed catching up with Nick Patience at the 451 Group; you can read his write-up of ESS here .

I was also very pleased to present on the topic of "Unified Information Access: Combining Search and BI Capabilities for Better Business Decisions" as part of the "Search Tools at Work" breakout. I focused primarily on our Baseball Demo , our FacetFinder and forthcoming image search module. Time ran out before I could present a variety of interesting case studies (featuring our customers), including quite remarkable work we are doing to support search with complex permissions, in real time, without using a database... more on that in a future post.

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