In the mid twentieth century, author (and librarian) Jorge Luis Borge published a short story called The Library of Babel. The story describes a huge library of many hexagonal rooms, each of which is filled with books. The problem was the books seemed to be nothing but pages of random characters. Readers could make no sense of it.
Many large organizations find themselves in a similar predicament with their digital archives. They have plenty of valuable information. But how to unlock its meaning, relevance, and insight?
If you’ve been following the Attivio blog, you’ll know that we have not been shy about sharing our ideas on what we see in the Big Data market right now. But in this post, our CEO, Stephen Baker, shares our predictions for the industry in 2017.
Time will tell how accurate these predictions are, but these are the trends we see bubbling up as we talk to customers, analysts, and others in the ecosystem.
Attivio’s latest patent covers one of the most interesting features in the Semantic Data Catalog and the one that always gets wows when we demo it – the automatic join finder. Under the hood, the technology replaces manual processes that could take hours or days with a quick, easy process that takes minutes.
If Aesop is right and we are known by the company we keep, Attivio’s success is a direct result of our associations with our top-notch channel partners. One of our longstanding resellers is Cadeon, an IT services and solutions provider based in Alberta, Canada. We recently checked in with Cadeon CEO Phil Unger about his ongoing work with Attivio.
Attivio: Tell us about your experience as an Attivio reseller.
The search market has come a long way from 2007 when Attivio was founded. We took some time to chat with Attivio co-founder and CTO Will Johnson about just how far Attivio has come and how the search market itself has evolved.
Q: You are one of Attivio’s founders. What’s the story behind Attivio’s origins? What challenges were you addressing?
WJ: The original founders of Attivio came from various search backgrounds: FAST (Fast Search and Transfer) which was sold to Microsoft, Altavista, and Northern Light. We had a lot of deep search expertise.
Can you imagine Thanksgiving dinner without the mandatory element of sweet potatoes? To Attivio, partners are the sweet potatoes of our go-to-market strategy. In the past year, channel revenues made up nearly 50% of the company’s new sales. So maybe partners are the sweet potatoes, the stuffing, the green bean casserole, and the cranberry sauce.
Forrester just released its latest Wave report. Unlike many on more mature technologies, this report on native Hadoop BI platforms included only six vendors, of which Attivio was one. In Forrester's estimation, there are no leaders in the market, just contenders and strong performers.
As any developer knows, perfect software doesn’t just happen it, pardon the pun, “develops” over time. Developers engage in a seemingly everlasting iterative process involving bug fixes and changes that can last for the lifetime of an application. But writing the software is only half the battle; it must then be deployed.
For big data companies like ours that run software across distributed networks, this is no small task. In particular, a developer makes changes, runs tests, identifies errors or processing improvements to address, and then makes more changes.
Matt Connon has an interesting job at Attivio. As the SVP of Channels and Partners, he gets the opportunity to work with a wide range of vendors and system integrators interested in what Attivio’s platform brings to the table. We spoke with Connon about his role and the importance of partners to Attivio’s success.
A Key Role as SVP of Channels and Partners
Connon leads the team responsible for developing Attivio’s partnerships to accelerate the sale and deployment of Attivio’s software and solutions to end user customers. Attivio focuses a great deal of attention to its channel partners with 50% of total new license revenue coming through channel partners. Connon says this number will grow as Attivio continues to scale and build strong relationships with resellers, ISVs, and other partners.
I followed Inc.’s lead and interviewed Stephen, but instead of discussing management, I asked about what’s happening in Attivio’s market space and the role we are playing.
