Attivio: New, New, New after $70 Million and Seven Years
February 7, 2015
With new senior managers and a hunt on for a new director of financial services, Attivio is definitely trying to shake ‘em up. I received some public relations spam about the most recent version of the Attivio system. The approach combines open source software with home brew code, an increasingly popular way to sell licenses, consulting, and services. To top it off, Attivio is an outfit that has the “best company culture” and Dave Schubmehl’s IDC report about Attivio with my name on it available for free. This was a $3,500 item on Amazon earlier this year. Now. Free.
Attivio’s February 3, 2015, news release explains that Attivio is in the enterprise search business. You can read the presser at this link. Not too long ago, Attivio was asserting that it was the solution to some business intelligence woes. I suppose search and business intelligence are related, but “real” intelligence requires more than keyword search and a report capability.
The release explains that Attivio is—I find this fascinating—“reinventing Big Data Search and Dexterity.” Not bad for open source, home brew, and Fast Search & Technology flavoring. Search and dexterity. Definitely a Google Adword keeper.
Attivio’s presser says:
Attivio 4.3 delivers new functionality and improvements that make it dramatically easier to build, deploy, and manage contextually relevant applications that drive revolutionary insight. Companies with structured and unstructured data in disparate silos can now quickly gain immediate access to all information with universal contextual enrichment, all delivered from Attivio’s agile enterprise platform.
I like “revolutionary insight.” Keep in mind that Attivio was formed by former Fast Search & Transfer executives in 2007 and has ingested, according to Crunchbase, $71.1 million in seven years. That works out to $10 million per year to do various technical things and sell products and services to generate money.
More significant to me than money that may be difficult or impossible to repay with a hefty uptick is that in seven years, Attivio has released four versions of its flagship software. With open source providing a chunk of functionality, it strikes me that Attivio may be lagging behind the development curve of some other companies in the content processing sector. But with advisors like Dave Schubmehl and his colleagues, the pace of innovation is likely to be explained as just wonderful. At Cambridge University, one researcher pointed out that work done in 2014 is essentially part of ancient history. There is perhaps a difference between Cambridge in the UK and Cambridge in Massachusetts.
What does Attivo 4.3 offer as “key features”? Here’s what the news release offers:
- ASAP: Attivio Search Application Platform – a simple, intuitive user interface for non-technical users building search-based applications;
- SAIL: Search Analytics Interactive Layer – offers more robust functionality and an enhanced user experience;
- Advanced Entity Extraction: New machine-learning based entity extraction module enriches content with higher accuracy and improved disambiguation, enabling deeper discovery and providing a smart alternative to managing entity dictionaries;
- Simplified Management: Empowers business users to handle documents and manage settings in a code-free environment;
- Composite Documents: Unique ability to search across document fragments optimized to deliver sub-second response times;
- New Designer Tools: Simplifies Attivio management through Visual Workflow and Component Editors, enables all users to design and build custom processing logic in an integrated UI.
There are a couple of important features that are available in other vendors’ systems; for example, geographic functions, automated real-time content collection, automated content analytics, and automated outputs to a range of devices, humans, or other systems.
The notion of ASAP and SAIL are catchy acronyms, but I find them less than satisfying. The entity extraction function is interesting but there is no detail about how it works in languages other than Roman based character sets, how the system deals with variants, and how the system maps one version of an entity to another in content that is either static imagery or video.
I am not sure what a composite document is. If a document contains images and videos, what does the system do with these content objects. If the document is an XML representation, what’s the time penalty to convert content objects to well formed XML? With interfaces becoming the new black, Attivio is closing the gap with the Endeca interface toolkit. Endeca dates from the late 1990s and has blazed a trail through the same marketing jungle that Attivio is now retracing.
For more information about Attivio, visit the company’s Web site at www.attivio.com. The company will be better equipped to explain virtual, enterprise search, big data, and the company’s financial posture than I.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2015
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