Attivo Software Tracks Down Data
Company:
Headquarters: Newton, Mass.
Technology Sector: Software
Key Product: Active Intelligence Engine
Year Founded: 2007
Number of Channel Partners: More than 30 OEMs, VARs and systems integrator partners worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket Focused Solution Provider
Why You Should Care: Attivio's software combines elements of search and business intelligence technology, helping organizations resolve the thorny problem of how to find and analyze structured and unstructured information.
The Lowdown: The total amount of digital data in the world is approaching 500 billion gigabytes and is doubling about every 18 months, according to an IDC estimate. Trouble is, making valuable use of all that information isn't easy.
Businesses today are awash in two types of data: structured and unstructured. The former is largely transactional data, the kind you find in corporate data warehouses and analyzed using traditional reporting and analysis tools. But those tools don't work well when it comes to unstructured information, everything from documents and e-mails to digitized audio and video " the kind of stuff we rely on search tools like Google to help us find.
Enter Attivio and its Active Intelligence Engine that combines search and business intelligence capabilities in one "unified information access" product, giving users the ability to search for both kinds of data.
"Let the context of the question dictate the results, not the structure of the data," said Andrew McKay, Attivio senior vice president, in a recent interview.
The Active Intelligence Engine combines structured query language and other technologies typically found in tools that work with structured data, with the "linguistic fuzziness" of enterprise search software, McKay said. The company has patented its next-generation data index technology that McKay said reproduces database tables inside of a search index. A unified interface allows users to search for and analyze numerical- and text-related data at the same time.
Attivio isn't the only vendor to attempt to resolve the structured-unstructured data access dilemma. Competitors include Endeca, Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer " the latter acquired by Microsoft in 2008. But McKay argues that Attivio's software is second-generation technology that's better designed for OEMs and solution providers to work with. Attivio also competes against data integration tools such as IBM's Omnifind, as well as home-grown systems that link disparate databases.
Today Attivio's sales are roughly equally split between direct sales (Europe's largest online dating site is a customer) and sales through business partners " today mostly OEMs such as data warehouse appliance maker Netezza and document-sharing software developer IntraLinks. But the company is recruiting more VARs and ISVs who can use the Active Intelligence Engine as a platform to develop applications that tap into its search capabilities. The software's multi-tenant architecture also makes it possible for channel partners to host it in a cloud-computing environment.
"Effectively, our partners can do anything they want with the product," McKay said. "We aren't domain experts. It's our partners that really show the [software's] value. We want to build a real ecosystem of partners."
McKay said the company is enlisting a range of channel partners, including those that make sales referrals to Attivio, others that help close deals with customers but leave the final sale to the vendor, and resellers who own the customer relationship and provide first-line support.