GARTNER MAGIC QUADRANT HERALDS UIA

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Heralds UIA

How Search-Based Applications Are Changing Enterprise Search

Gartner’s 2015 Enterprise Search Magic Quadrant documents the arrival of a new generation of search-based applications – leaving behind the ‘single search box’ and the contextual, but unscalable search app.  With its arrival in the Leader quadrant, Attivio signals the market’s shift to a unified search platform capable of supporting an unlimited number of context-aware applications – at enterprise scale.  Why?

It’s precisely the ability to collect the complete spectrum of information (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured) needed for the next-level of insight and performance that’s selected for (in a Darwinian sense) a unified information applications (UIA) platform like Attivio.  With a seemingly endless demand for answers and evidence, a tsunami-like increase in information of all sorts, and commonplace acceptance of data visualization tools like Qlik, Tableau, and Spotfire, the emergence of an agile, enterprise platform that supports a single, universal, enriching source set shouldn’t be a surprise.

Simply collecting information of all sorts isn’t sufficient, however.  This next generation of search infrastructure is being asked to do more – to fuel discovery and foster innovation.  To elevate search to the strategic status organizations need for true business transformation, there’s more to expect from this new generation.

At the heart of discovery and innovation, there’s an ability to correlate information faster and with greater certainty than your competition.  And that ability to correlate new information, automatically, in turn requires continual, universal enrichment of every data source.  While the analogy of sequencing DNA is easy to overdraw, the systematic analysis of content is a necessary step to gaining insight and inspiring disruption.

Lest We Forget

The essential components for enterprise-scale deployment – the elements that insure reliability, performance, minimal-cost maintenance, and tight security – have evolved as well.  As market-leaders such as Cisco, UBS, National Instruments, Thermo Fisher, and Intralinks have found, the previous generation of search platforms are difficult and/or expensive to scale adequately.  A quick comparison of this year’s Magic Quadrant assignments with previous Quadrants is instructive.

Take a look back, say, two or three years.  Even with consolidation and acquisition, leaders in earlier generations have not been able to sustain their positions.  It’s not that the acquiring firms were unfamiliar with the requirements for enterprise success.  It’s because ‘adding’ enterprise elements to existing infrastructure isn’t easy.  It takes vision and execution.

What the Future Holds

With the arrival of a universal, enterprise-grade index/catalog, Attivio has freed our customers from the trade-off between context and scalability – permitting the deployment of an unlimited number of scalable, contextually focused solutions for finding and correlating information.  Our largest customers are changing their businesses, fundamentally – outpacing their competition and achieving innovation at record speeds.  But, there’s one more thing...

Attivio just announced a major upgrade, Attivio 5, to the platform Gartner reviewed.  This release will extend the agility of search-based discovery and the power of content analytics to deliver the applications that no modern organization can afford to live without.  As I mentioned above, one of the complicating factors that’s driving ‘search-tectonics’ is the accumulation of new information – from existing and emerging sources.  The most common challenge facing data scientists and business analysts is the time and effort spent finding and understanding information.

Attivio 5 offers a comprehensive, self-service application – a semantic data catalog – designed to profile, identify, and unify disparate information sources throughout an organization and to support the strategic deployment of applications that provide the answers and evidence that drive insight. I invite you to join the conversation around this new capability and how the power of next-generation search will be harnessed to turn the challenges of Big Data and Big Content into strategic opportunity.  Now, that’s what search is all about!