Thursday, August 19, 2010 - www.eBizQ.net

Getting the right information quickly and easily determines the quality, speed and success of nearly every critical business activity. But too often the information you request is incomplete, unprocessed or buried in a set of material you don't really need or don't have time to sort through. This is because traditionally we have had to use different technologies and interfaces for retrieving different types of information - a world of silos that frequently doesn't align with users' needs because they aren't divided neatly into data vs. document sources or database applications vs. search environments. Unified Information Access ends this segmentation, providing a platform that supports users' demands for insight and comprehensive views of what they need to know to achieve business goals.

Unified information access takes the best of enterprise search and combines it with the latest in business intelligence, analytics and data management. It provides the truly unified content and data experience that enterprise executives require to make better informed business decisions to drive success.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to read Part 1 in this series.

Thursday, August 12, 2010 - www.eBizQ.net

The method for finding information on the Web has become such a standard that we have turned a company name into a verb. Googling is great for finding the address for a specialist you've been referred to or perhaps pizza restaurants in west Boulder, Colorado (searching "pizza west boulder," I got 503,000 results in .35 seconds, the first of which was about something called Pizza Boulders in the Dona Ana Mountains, but 6 of the first 10 were pizza places in Boulder and the other 3 were pizza parlors on the Boulder Highway in Las Vegas. So, sure, the results were good enough.). But the truth is that this level of results doesn't satisfy business demands for intelligence that is exact, contextual and complete - and that is either processed and produced on demand or delivered automatically. Like Googling, enterprise search engines just search content and can't access or synthesize the data that business people need to make decisions, detect risks and explore possibilities. What's more, search returns a list, which, while better than nothing, still requires you to dig and then manually combine with relevant data and other documents.

Enterprise search engines have now been around long enough that business users have become disillusioned and are demanding better capabilities for getting important information. In response, new technologies have been introduced, and the vendor landscape has been shifting. Acquisitions, redirected strategies and discontinued products have altered the market, but the most significant development is the emergence of a new class of technology: unified information access (UIA), which delivers complete information - regardless of type or source - by combining capabilities from search, business intelligence and text analytics.

This article details the top 10 reasons enterprises and government agencies worldwide are replacing their legacy search technology with UIA to expand their information access capabilities.

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Friday, August 6, 2010 - CIO.com, by Sid Probstein

The first wave of enterprise search helped companies tap into the world of text+, sometimes referred to as "unstructured" or "semi-structured" information. Primary drivers included the need to monetize digital content, reduce risk through compliance, or increase employee, customer and partner productivity. These early implementations provided significant value and solved important problems; they also demonstrated limitations that have lead to demand for the next generation - Unified Information Access (UIA).

This article details the top 5 most important reasons the world's most visionary enterprises are upgrading to UIA.

Click here to read the full article on CIO.com.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - Company Release

Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine chosen for content monetization, advanced permissioning and workflow

Attivio, Inc. today announced that the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), the world's largest association dedicated to workplace learning and performance professionals has implemented the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) to power its public and member websites. ASTD members come from more than 100 countries and connect locally in more than 130 U.S. chapters. Members work in thousands of organizations of all sizes, in government, as independent consultants and as suppliers.

"With the many members and partners we service daily, it is extremely important for us to have a platform that does more than simply return search results. We needed a technology that would intelligently handle access control, so we could display relevant members-only content to non-member visitors in order to drive additional value," said Tony Bingham, president & CEO, ASTD. "We selected Attivio for its innovative approach to unified information access including advanced permissioning, workflow, tunable relevancy profiles and content spotlighting. With AIE, we not only improved functionality, we actually replaced two other technologies with just this one platform to reduce operational overhead, licensing costs and complexity."

Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine solves the long-standing problem of information isolation. Unlike legacy enterprise search, AIE ingests all of types of data (structured and unstructured) to create a universal index where users can retrieve relevant information with one simple, search-style query. Through its advanced capabilities, Attivio AIE retains explicit data relationships as well as identifying implicit ones, ensuring that the aggregated information is intelligent and relational. It also enables users to manage and analyze numerical and text-based data integrated from internal and external sources, using graphical interfaces, reporting and querying.

By using a single instance of AIE to host multiple unique applications, ASTD was able to replace its search appliance, while adding additional capabilities including dynamic faceting and PDF support. The organization selected Attivio for its robust platform and agile capabilities. AIE provides ASTD with a single, context-sensitive, linguistically rich search across multiple information sources. It can also connect to a new social-networking ECM system currently in development. The next phase of the project is to monetize archival content and enable micro-payments.

"A number of industry thought leaders have noted that legacy search is not robust enough to handle the data needs of today's enterprise, which is why unified information access is emerging as the standard for initiatives that require more agility, accuracy and efficiency," said Ali Riaz, CEO of Attivio . "ASTD is one such forward-thinking organization. With thousands of members, and partners from around the world, they understand the value of a true UIA platform, which is why they selected Attivio to upgrade their capabilities. "

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Monday, June 14, 2010 - searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com, by Jeff Kelly

The goal is "to deliver a unified view of information by breaking down the wall between the quantitative world of BI and the semistructured world beyond its scope," Gartner analyst James Richardson wrote.

In addition to helping workers gain new insights, technology like AIE could also help make BI more accessible. Because its user interface is modeled after the familiar Web search format, business users who might otherwise be too intimidated to try a traditional ad hoc query tool are likely to take to it, according to Richardson.

"CIOs looking to make BI more pervasive might consider AIE, as it will make it easier for workers not accustomed to traditional BI tools to find the information they need to make decisions," he wrote.

Forrester's Evelson agreed, noting that tools like AIE resemble Google but with "a lot more analytics baked in."

Click here to read the full article!

Monday, June 7, 2010 - Information Today, Paula Hane

Since its launch two and a half years ago, Attivio, Inc. has been singularly focused on enabling unified access to structured and unstructured information. With Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), users retrieve and analyze all types of content and data with simple, search-style queries. New features in AIE version 2.1 include SQL support (via a JDBC driver), key phrase detection, content spotlighting, entity-level sentiment analysis, and integrated connector support for active security. With the release of AIE 2.1, Attivio also provides a platform for building applications, such as dashboards, which provide a comprehensive view across documents, websites, emails, and more, as well as data that has traditionally been limited to database applications.

Last year, Attivio announced a beta program to test its new AIE SQL module that would let customers write and execute SQL queries against AIE directly or from existing enterprise BI tools and applications. The company has since completed the beta with two customers and AIE 2.1 now includes this full SQL support.

"With the latest version of AIE, we have accomplished some significant milestones. Support for AI-SQL via JDBC delivers the precision of SQL with the fuzziness of search, using a language that is entirely familiar to virtually all developers. At the same time, key phrasing helps to disambiguate an entity based on statistical improbabilities, while our sentiment analysis capabilities can see beyond seemingly positive content to get to the underlying cause of negativity," said Sid Probstein, chief technology officer, Attivio. "These features are not available in legacy enterprise search, data management, or business intelligence technologies. AIE brings the best of these solutions into a single UIA platform."

Click here to read the Information Today article on Attivio!

Monday, May 10, 2010 - www.eWeek.com, by Sarah Meyer

Poor communication and information sharing is a serious challenge faced by groups of people in government agencies and in enterprises large and small. Unified information access technology-a combination of enterprise search, business intelligence, data warehousing, process automation, and analytics-can give enterprises a better view into their data so they can make better decisions. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Sarah Meyer explains what enterprises should look for when implementing unified information access as part of their information management strategy.

Click here to read the full article.

Thursday, April 29, 2010 - InformationManagement.com - DMRadio

Enterprise Search can help professionals find key pieces of data, but is it trusted data? And how appropriate are those search results? Often times, BI Search goes outside the usual quality and cleansing infrastructure, which can cause some issues. But there are many advances in search these days, thanks to hierarchies, metadata and ontologies. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to learn more!We'll hear from Nimitt Desai, Deloitte; Scott Whitney, Mimosa Systems; Rik Tamm-Daniels, Attivio and Jake Freivald, Information Builders.

Click here to listen to the audio webcast.

Thursday, April 28, 2010 - Content Management Connection

I recently had the pleasure of doing a video interview with Attivio CTO Sid Probstein. Our discussion centered around the deluge of content created by social media on the web and what companies are doing to try to combine that public opinion and sentiment with their own internal, enterprise content and data.

We focused primarily on the impact within the enterprise. I started by asking Sid about the opportunity within enterprise 2.0 to take advantage of looking at the unstructured data to determine the pulse of the enterprise and what conversations are going on. In 2008 more content was produced on the Web that in the history of content production, largely because of the vast increase in social media use.

Click here to read the full article.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - Social Media Governence, Chris Boudreaux

If you run your Sales or CRM on Salesforce.com, you know that Salesforce does not let you search the text fields in your lead, prospect or customer records, and that can be a big inconvenience. Attivio launched a demo video showing their integration with Salesforce that makes the Salesforce text fields searchable in real time.

Accenture's Chris Boudreaux highlights a couple of use cases where the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine can be used to better utilize social media at scale.

Click here to read the full article.