Extreme Information: Completing the Big Data Picture

Analytic database management systems and massively parallel processing address the challenge of massive data volumes, but significant gaps exist in their ability to handle the variety and complexity of information necessary to give you the complete picture that drives business insight.

Consider all the sources of unstructured content that contain important insights about employee, partner and customer behavior and opinions. There is a wealth of value that is today largely untapped — emails, open-ended survey questions, web forms, call logs, discussion boards, SharePoint and Wiki sites to name just a few.

Attivio completes the Big Data picture by fulfilling the demands of what Gartner calls Extreme Information — high levels of volume, velocity, variety and complexity.

Enhance signal strength. The data in your structured databases is not enough to fully understand your business performance. With the volume of unstructured data on pace to overwhelm traditional, structured data, it's critical to develop capabilities that leverage the unstructured content that inundates you on a daily basis. [It] provides a depth of understanding that traditional data simply can't. You need to capture it and exploit it, or fall behind.

— Jane Griffin, Seven Principles of Sustainable Analytics, Information Management (March/April 2011)

The Attivio Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) addresses head-on the need to draw in-depth understanding from unstructured content, integrated with Big Data, enabling new business insights and opportunities that might otherwise have gone undiscovered.

The AIE Extreme Modules make clear that Attivio understands the increasingly important role Big Data plays in the enterprise. Combined with the unique capabilities of its core AIE platform, the company is on solid footing to thrive in the Era of Big Data. Enterprises that are already experimenting with Hadoop and other Big Data technologies should consider the AIE platform to bring Big Data insights to business users and to demonstrate the power of Big Data to executives.

— Jeff Kelly, Wikibon

AIE also offers an application platform enabling rapidly-deployed united information access (UIA) applications and workflows that easily incorporate and converge existing Big Data infrastructures with all enterprise unstructured content (as shown below).

Problem

• Business User Gap — Existing Big Data products leave a large gap for business users who must rely on highly-skilled technical resources to gain insight from their Big Data.
• Complexity — Developing new Big Data applications or integrating with existing packaged applications is challenging.
• Single Data Source — Typically oriented toward a single, standalone source of data.
• Big Data Answers "What," but not "Why" — Primarily made up of structured and/or semi-structured data, such as clickstreams or logs to tell you "what" happened, but not the "why' that's trapped in emails, documents, call logs, etc.

Solution

• Universal information repository — AIE integrates information, regardless of source or format, into a single repository, with no need for complex data schemas. Structured data retains relationships such as key fields.
• Business signals automatically drawn from unstructured data — AIE automatically mines and extracts key phrases and entities; categorizes documents; assesses positive or negative opinions expressed in a document and about specific entities in documents, providing key "why" dimensions for analytic insight.
• UIA application framework — AIE lets you build UIA applications that provide relevant structured data and unstructured content together in a single, user-friendly view, bridging the gap between Big Data and business users. AIE supports both SQL and search APIs for maximum flexibility.
• In-engine data integration and transformation — AIE workflows automate data collection, integration and transformation including data cleansing, normalization, text analytics and data mining. Triggers within workflows can send relevant data to user interfaces, other applications or directly to users via alerts. AIE is designed for real-time streaming of new information into the universal information repository.

Attivio Impact

Attivio AIE completes the Big Data picture:

• Add "why" insights from unstructured contentto your analytics
  
• Access all data types for BI and decision making with one query
• Turn Big Data into real-time Active Information that initiates action
• Eliminate latency of information that causes "blind spots"

Related Links

Attivio Announces XT Modules to Complete the Big Data Picture

Attivio Shows its Big Data Savvy

Missing Some Key Points with Big Data