Ami Albert Joined Bertin Technologies a Year Ago and Is Alive
August 22, 2016
I learned about the Ami search system called Albert a decade ago. My notes indicated that at that time the company was Swiss but had strong ties to France. Not surprisingly, when Ami’s market momentum dictated a sale, a French company stepped forward and bought Ami and its happy face identity:
Bertin Technologies has integrated Ami Albert into its market intelligence suite. Search appears to be a utility function. The company says that it is “a publisher and integrator of cutting edge software solutions.” The company offers cyber security, digital intelligence, and speech processing.
According to the deal description on the Bertin Web site:
The ability to offer Market Intelligence and Risk Intelligence sees the creation of a key player in Web Content Mining, whose international outlook is supported by an industrial group with a presence in 15 countries.
Ami, a search vendor, morphed into a market intelligence company. When the deal was announced in mid 2015, AMI had 150 clients. The company operated via two subsidiaries in the UK and Morocco. The unique value of Ami comes from Bertin’s capabilities.
In 2006, Ami counted LexisNexis, Sinequa, Lingway, and itself via the Go Albert unit as “partners.”
The company’s search interface looked like this before Ami pivoted to content scraping and “market intelligence.”
Search results looked like this:
Ami emphasized that it could perform metasearch functions; that is, take a user’s query and send it to different systems with individual search interfaces. Here’s how Ami presented this idea to prospective customers:
Ami also emulated the analytic report methods found in i2 Analyst’s Notebook and Palantir Technologies, among others.
No details about the terms of the deal were announced. I did not include Ami Albert in any of the Enterprise Search Report profiles I created. The company seemed to be focused on building traction in Europe, not the US. In retrospect, Ami’s trajectory is similar to many other search vendors’. The company enters the market, moves forward for ten years, and then sells. A new owner is probably a better fate than locking the doors and turning off the lights.
Stephen E Arnold, August 22, 2016
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