Forrester Wave Heralds the Future of Search

How Enterprise Search and Big Data Find Common Purpose

Forrester’s 2015 Wave on Search and Knowledge-based Discovery is out, offering a fresh perspective on the evolution of search-based applications.  We are pleased that Forrester designated Attivio as a Leader in this category and that the evolution described suggests an important connection between next-generation search and the opportunities of Big Data.

As a Leader, Attivio demonstrated exceptional accomplishment along all three dimensions analyzed by Forrester – strategy, strength of product offering, and market presence.  And, with our upcoming release of Attivio 5, we will offer a new, collaborative environment for delivering enterprise-scale solutions that unlocks the value of all data – structured or unstructured, Big or not– for every organization.  

What the Future Holds

Of course, you might reasonably ask, “What does Forrester’s perspective and Attivio’s new release mean for my organization?”

• First, it harnesses everything you’ve come to appreciate from search – do-it-yourself convenience, result-driven navigation and discovery, content integration and correlation, and a tight link between context and answer – into a new framework that finds answers and discovers new possibilities.

• Second, it directly applies the power of search to tame the Big Data beasts before us. Attivio’s semantic data catalog offering is the first fruit of our focus on the intersection of search and Big Data.  BI managers and analysts routinely struggle to understand and leverage the contents of their ‘data lake’.  Search can unlock the full potential.

• Third, it eliminates common bottlenecks that have isolated potential insight from data analysts – bottlenecks that make data invisible or inaccessible and that frustrate data users and managers alike.  With the Attivio semantic data catalog, locating and understanding structured information become convenient, self-service tasks for every data analyst.

• Fourth, it’s about extracting more from content and data – creating informed context that increases precision and powers the correlation that fosters discovery. Just as DNA sequencing categorizes living things, Attivio’s text analytics categorize and establish structure from previously unstructured information.

Moving forward, chances are your organization will confront  

• A never-ending demand for answers and evidence,
• A tsunami-like surge of information of all sorts, and
• Nearly universal access to snappy data visualization tools like Tableau, Spotfire, and Qlik 

The right platform to meet those demands, surges and expectations should be agile, enterprise-scale, and based upon a single, universal, enriched catalog of information sources - one that’s capable of supporting an unlimited number of context-aware, search-based applications.  With Attivio 5, those requirements are met – with a new capability designed to solve common Big Data challenges.