At Attivio, we align with channel partners who have deep industry expertise, and we think of our partners as an extension of our team. We are pleased to welcome a new partner to our circle of influence: MC+A.
We had a chance to catch up with Michael Cizmar, Managing Director, of MC+A, and ask him a few questions.
JZ: Tell me about MC+A.
MC: I founded MC+A in 2004 after a post “dot com” sabbatical to Brazil. MC+A is a boutique consulting firm focused on search and search derivative technologies since before it was cool. We help our clients deliver better experiences that happen to be driven by search.
JZ: Your website says, “Changing the way you find answers and insights.” How do you do that?
If you Google “OEM: build versus buy,” you’ll get nearly a million results. It almost doesn’t matter what area of technology you pick, at some point there’s going to be a build versus buy bridge to cross.
For example, let’s take embedded analytics. That’s a hot topic right now among bloggers and industry analysts. ISVs that build line-of-business applications see embedded analytics as a way to differentiate their products. And, since they’re software companies, they could develop and embed the analytics themselves, right? Yes, they could.
But should they? Probably not. There are a lot reasons, not the least of which is time to market. While ISV “A” is developing and embedding analytics in its app, competitors “B” through whatever have already embedded someone else’s best-of-breed analytics. First mover advantage is not to be underestimated.
Attivio joined forces with our partner Persistent Systems to build an app that provides a 360° view of the customer on the Salesforce Service Cloud. Engage 360 unifies information from across distributed data sources, such as similar cases, prior solutions, and internal knowledge bases. With a complete view of their customer information, service organizations realize faster turnaround on customer cases. This video, featuring Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems, and Lou Jordano, CMO at Attivio, explains the partnership and the new Engage 360 app.
On the occasion of the Engage 360 launch, we had the opportunity to interview Sudhir.
We recently had a chance to catch up with him and get his take on the latest trends & happenings in Big Data & Hadoop.
Attivio: What challenges are you seeing among Cloudera clients?
Hadoop and big data projects in general usually encompass the management and analysis of many different forms of data. Sometimes the data sources can be quite diverse and there are many different types of implementations depending on what an organization is trying to achieve.
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?
As I’ve mentioned in prior blogs, the biggest use cases we see in Hadoop these days come from the risk and compliance functions of large banks. Initially, many banks and other financial services institutions (FSIs) adopted Hadoop out of sheer necessity despite its early immaturity on the governance front. With primary analytic use cases such as Know Your Customer, eCommunications Surveillance, and Anti-Money Laundering, FSIs need analytic solutions that can run at massive scale—the Hadoop sweet spot.
The scope and scale of today’s enterprise challenges are unprecedented in terms of their complexity. Vast volumes of information are scattered across the ecosystem and around the globe, and enterprises often are expected to dynamically retrieve precisely the right data set on a moment’s notice to win a customer’s loyalty. If not, other vendors eagerly await to win that customer’s lifetime business. Every transaction is a lifetime transaction.
In this hyper complex and hyper competitive environment, no single vendor can do it all by themselves. The success of one enterprise is inextricably linked to the quality of its partnerships. OEM partners, by nature, often form the critical core of another’s customer-facing solution. And so it is with TIBCO.
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.
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.
It's pretty obvious to anyone who follows analytics and Big Data that an end-to-end solution for the Big Data stack will require best-of-breed technologies from multiple vendors. No single vendor can develop all the technology pieces on its own. New applications and data processing frameworks emerge and change much too quickly. As enterprises strive to create a modern and flexible hybrid data infrastructure, they look for technologies that are easy to embed and extend.
That's why Dell EMC™ chose the Attivio Data Unification Platform for its Analytic Insights Module. The Attivio platform is definitely OEM friendly. Its architecture is open, scalable, and API-accessible, which makes for secure and seamless integration with other systems.
