Attivio Launches Search System Upgrade, Readies Reseller Channel Effort

Attivio has launched a new release of its unified information access software offering new self-service data discovery capabilities the company said overcomes one of the biggest roadblocks to big data analysis efforts.

The release of Attivio 5 comes as the Newton, Mass.-based company gears up to launch a channel program and recruit solution provider partners this fall.

A major hurdle to widespread adoption and use of business analytics tools among everyday business users is the complex task of locating relevant data in disparate sources and integrating it for analysis. Eighty percent of most business intelligence initiatives are centered on data integration tasks and 80 percent of that effort is identifying and profiling the data needed for analysis.

[Related: 2015 Big Data 100: Data Management]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

Attivio, which has its roots in enterprise search, has focused its core Active Intelligence Engine software on the task of finding and indexing structured and unstructured data in such disparate sources as relational databases, corporate applications, content management systems and Microsoft SharePoint.

"We see a huge opportunity in big data and business analytics," said CEO Stephen Baker in an interview with CRN. Baker was named the company's top executive in December after serving as Attivio's chief operating officer for nine months.

Attivio is battling in a complex and crowded market, competing with commercial products such as Oracle's Endeca and Hewlett-Packard's Autonomy, as well as open-source technologies such as the Apache Software Foundation's Lucene, which incorporates the Apache Solr open-source search server.

This week the company debuted Attivio 5, a new release of the software featuring self-service capabilities for business analysts and data scientists. While data management professionals still produce the comprehensive index of all data sources in an IT ecosystem, business users utilize tools in the new release to unify self-selected data tables from the index. That, according to Attivio, reduces the time-to-value of business intelligence projects.

"The great thing about Attivio is that it knits all that data together," said Phil Unger, CEO of Cadeon Associates, a Calgary, Alberta-based solution provider that provides consulting and integration services in data warehousing, data virtualization, reporting, analytics and enterprise information architectures. Attivio's software "becomes that single go-to source," he said.

Cadeon partners with Attivio and resells its software as part of its big data projects. "We've had some tremendous wins" with the product, Unger said. "It's really a framework for solving business problems."

Unger applauded a new function in Attivio 5 that runs natively inside the Hadoop big data platform to index data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). "It's easy to get data into Hadoop, but not so easy to get data out."

Cadeon has worked with Attivio for four years and today is one of a handful of the company's solution provider partners, including Persistent Systems, DSA Solutions and Mphasis. Until now, however, Attivio's focus has been on working with systems integrators such as Accenture, Wipro Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, which are involved in about two-thirds of Attivio's customer engagements.

But Baker intends to grow Attivio's roster of OEM, reseller and solution provider partners. "As we go from summer to fall we're going to be rolling out our new channel program," he promised. For 2016, "our goal is to be generating at least 50 percent of our revenue through the channel."

PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2015