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.

3. You've hit the wall with search appliances

Did you spend more than expected on consultants to implement and tune an appliance - and then struggle again when you needed to include more documents or upgrade the appliance? Is your IT department struggling to sync and support silos of appliances that sprang up across the enterprise?

Why UIA is better: Attivio is enterprise software that scales to the largest organizations

If appliances with document limits have sprouted around your company, if the unexpected consulting costs of getting these appliances to meet your needs is busting budgets, if you have realized benefits of standardizing on an enterprise solution across your organization, then it's time to consider the advantages of scalable, powerful UIA. Attivio's AIE is also designed for rapid development and deployment, with powerful workflows that simplify custom work.

4. You're concerned about future plans of current search vendor

Is your vendor headed in a direction that aligns with your needs? Some search companies have been acquired and changed direction, even abandoning some lines of business or support of some operating systems. Others have bought application vendors that signal a shift in strategy away from innovation in search capabilities that don't suit the new market plan. Where does this leave you?

Why UIA is better: Attivio is 100% focused on UIA

Unlike many search vendors who have changed their strategy in recent years, Attivio started as a UIA company. Our product was designed for this purpose and remains our sole focus. We are not focusing on becoming an application provider or supporting the product lines of just a single company.

5. The challenges of implementing open source search are far more daunting than you expected

Did you try implementing open source search, only to find it took much longer and was much harder to get satisfactory results than expected? Does open source give you just a portion of your overall requirements, while your needs have evolved way beyond keyword search? Do you find yourself thinking of the old cliché of "having one throat to choke"?

Why UIA is better: Attivio AIE offers complete UIA functionality and a rapid development environment so you get value in a few weeks instead of many, many months

Open source solutions provide building blocks that require significant time and expertise to implement. The challenge can be much more difficult than anticipated. In fact, many Attivio customers come to us after abandoning their open source search efforts. Besides the effort to implement open source, companies are finding that the results leave them with partial solutions to complex information retrieval goals. With Attivio AIE, you can future-proof applications and intranets with the latest advances in information access. Even if you only want better search today and plan more extensive innovations later, moving up to unified information access now ensures the best search experience and a flexible platform to gradually implement additional UIA capabilities.

6. You need to unify access to all information for critical applications

You've heard about a new generation of products that let you find any type of information with one query or return results in executive dashboards and reports, and you want the advantages now. You're dealing with more types and sources of information and falling behind competitors in leveraging what's available and untapped. Perhaps you want to include unstructured content in a data application because your data applications and dashboards are missing the context and important data contained in documents. You've read about new text analytics, like sentiment analysis and entity extraction, and you want this data included for real 360° views.

Why UIA is better: UIA is all about delivering complete information with a single query

Every company struggles with an information dilemma: valuable data is locked in incompatible formats and is retrieved and analyzed with different technologies, which in turn leave the results in forms that can't easily be combined and analyzed. What's more, when information remains separate, some important insight is missed entirely. How often do you read that a company or government agency was unable to connect the dots to see an important issue in time to minimize the impact? With AIE, you not only detect issues earlier, you can gain better insight into customers, which helps you up-sell and cross-sell as well as strengthen the customer relationship. UIA enriches results by including access to all relevant information so you get complete insight on demand.

7. Users complain about the relevance of results

Have you heard these complaints: Why does search return a list of so many unrelated documents when I typed a specific topic? It's like fishing with a giant net - and I have to manually sort through to see if the document I want is listed. Sometimes I never do find the document I need.

Why UIA is better: UIA improves relevancy of results

With Attivio AIE, you get superior out-of-the box relevancy, inclusion of data in results, and the added insight provided by content analytics. AIE automates processes that improve relevancy, and the latest navigation tools, such as facet recommendations, also contribute to increased relevancy during information discovery. No longer do you have to settle for a long list of documents to dig through manually.

8. You hear complaints about user experience with search

Why is search in applications nothing more than a search box? Why aren't there tag clouds and auto-completion like you see online? Where are the menus of related topics and aspects of the topic being searched?

Why UIA is better: With UIA, you get richer exploration methods in flexible user interfaces

UIA ensures that users get what they are looking for. For example, customer dashboards can include all the information you need - from transactions to emails to assessments of the customer's satisfaction and value to the company - so every staff member can serve the customer as though they had always been their dedicated representative. Attivio AIE provides the latest navigation and discovery tools: tag clouds, auto-completion, automatically generated facet recommendations, heat maps, and search-style queries to retrieve any type of information, including data from database tables.

9. You need something more innovative and useful for getting critical information into users' hands

You need something that helps you derive a higher return on your investment in information and that helps you quickly detect the patterns that reveal opportunities, issues and risks. You've heard there are simpler user interfaces with search-based applications, and that they're easier to explore.

Why UIA is better: With UIA, you get the innovative power of better information, better user experience, and easier-to-develop search-based applications

Not only is UIA innovative, but it enables your innovation. With more complete information on demand, you get better insight so you can seize opportunities faster. You also get a richer environment for discovering and experimenting with information, so you can fuel ideas and improvements. AIE also lets you track social media comments and reviews on your company and products and performs sentiment analysis to automatically categorize it as positive or negative. This insight not only allows you to act quickly on issues and complaints, it helps product managers understand the market and offer innovations that are inspired directly by customers.

10. Processes are choked because you can't make all your content securely searchable

Search engines typically lack sophisticated permissioning methods that enable companies to control access to sensitive documents - and to ensure that permissions are absolutely current. To avoid letting users see documents they shouldn't, the documents are usually hidden from everyone - even the users who need them.

Why UIA is better: Attivio AIE offers robust permissioning that updates in near real time

AIE's permissioning model is a hybrid design that offers multiple advantages. Not only does AIE provide complex and detailed permissioning, you are assured that any changes to permissions are updated in near real-time. You aren't forced to withhold access to sensitive documents to people who need them out of concern that they will be retrieved via search by someone who shouldn't have access. And all of this performs to scale to meet the most demanding environments. Want to know more? Here's a link to a recent Attivio webinar on our permissioning model.

Ready to learn more? Check out the videos and other resources on our Enterprise Search Upgrade Program page and request your one-on-one consultation today!

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