Authored by Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, IDC
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." |