Analyst Reports

451 Group Impact Report - Attivio adds to its search story and gets sentimental

Nick Patience and Katey Wood, August 2009

It's been 18 months since the initial launch of Attivio, the enterprise search startup founded by former FAST Search & Transfer executives. Over the last year the company has been busy with proofs of concept and implementations, developing new features for customers that have driven enhancements in its new 1.5 release of the Active Intelligence Engine (AIE). Besides new modules for text analysis and optical character recognition (OCR), this version has more security features and querying options for structured data in order to make good on the company's promise of enabling customers to replace relational databases with its search engine.

Attivio has the engineering pedigree to be a worthy FAST successor, now that FAST is part of Microsoft – indeed, it claims good replacement business in the OEM markets of both FAST and Autonomy. New capabilities in version 1.5 open up even more use cases for the product, including voice-of-the-customer and market research applications, publishing industry tools and e-discovery. But while other search companies are expanding into vertical search-based applications, Attivio has committed itself to not competing with its partners. This could be a wise move since much of the rest of the space continues to become more specialized. The firm's next goal is to replace databases; higher availability, better backup, improved security and a new SQL module will gird the platform for this, and Attivio has found several early adopters willing to make the leap. FAST had a similar aim with its Adaptive Information Warehouse a few years ago – could it be an idea whose time has come?

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IDC Vendor Spotlight - The Case for Unifying Information Access

Susan Feldman, September 2008

"Since 2005, IDC surveys have shown the CIOs and CTOs want a single information access application that is capable of handling both data and content from a single, easy-to-use interface. Although a multitude of products all professing to solve this problem have recently appeared, creating such an architecture has proved to be a real challenge. Until recently, these products were better suited to handle either transactional data or textual content - not both. Traditional search engines are optimized to handle unstructured information; they lose the context that a database provides when they add raw data to a search index. Conversely, business intelligence (BI) systems have their own limitations because, although some offer limited text analytics, these tools are geared toward analyzing only transactional data and lose the context that the text provides - the reasons behind the data points.

IDC believes that BI and search are converging in new products and technologies as demand for unified access to information escalates. This paper examines the features and capabilities of these newer search and information unification technologies and explains why they are so important to the businesses that need to mine the myriad of information stored throughout their organization. It also examines enterprise software vendor Attivio and the role that its next-generation information access platform, the Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), will have in this strategically significant market."

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IDC Private Vendor Watchlist - Attivio Profile

Susan Feldman and Ryan Patterson, May 2008

In this report, Attivio receives the highest rankings possible for market potential, technology/solution and corporate strategy and is recognized for its small technology footprint, easy implementation and fast enterprise search results. The analysts suggest that Attivio may one day be able to replace many functions of traditional data warehouse technologies and ranks Attivio highly against competitors.

"IDC believes strongly that BI and search are converging, and that certain segments of the market are demanding unified access to information. This is a hard problem to solve across database and content repositories. Matters of normalization, differing schemas, format types, and a variety of legacy applications make it difficult. In the past two years, a very few search vendors have developed new architectures that blend the inverted index with the database. These new architectures are a leap forward, but we believe that Attivio’s new architecture is another leap beyond them".

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451 Group - Attivio, Founded By Former FAST Folks, Looks to Shake Up Search

Nick Patience, May 2008

This report examines the enterprise search landscape, comparing and contrasting leading vendors in the space while highlighting Attivio’s founding in August 2007 and launch in January 2008. The analyst finds that the search market is currently wide open and that Attivio is positioned well to be a new player in the ripe OEM market. The report is very optimistic about Attivio’s opportunity to succeed: "With Autonomy Corp the largest independent search vendor deriving its growth from areas other than search, the field is open for new and smaller companies to grow into major players. Attivio certainly has the pedigree to do that if it can deliver the product it promises."

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