Friday, October 19, 2012 - Boston.com Global Business Hub, By Mark O'Toole
Attivio develops a technology that helps companies unify data and business content in new ways. What are some of the challenges you see companies facing from a data perspective?
There are three main challenges.
The first challenge with data is that it's not just data. It is data plus content, and that content comes in many forms and from many places. It's easy for people to lump everything into the popular “Big Data†bucket, but that's a bit of a misnomer. It's more like Big Information.
The second challenge is that global companies are made of silos. There are multiple geographical business units, information repositories, applications, interfaces, protocols, ontologies, schemas and untold external sources that don't always match and get along. Just dumping information into these organized but separate systems doesn't help you access it, analyze it or derive business intelligence from it.
The third challenge is that many businesses don't know exactly what they are looking for. Imagine searching for a needle in a giant haystack, except you don't know what a needle looks like or how it feels.
Companies need a better way to access and leverage all of their information at a moment's notice, regardless of where it lives, who put it there, why, when and how it is stored, or what form it takes. They need unified information access. That is the problem Attivio was built to solve.
Click here to read the full article and to watch the associated videos on Boston.com!