Attivio and MC+A Combine Forces
April 7, 2018
Over the years, Attivio positioned itself as more than search. That type of shift has characterized many vendors anchored in search and retrieval. We noted that Attivio has “partnered” with MC+A, a search centric company. MC+A also forged a relationship with Coveo, another search and retrieval vendor with a history of repositioning.
We learned from “Attivio and MC+A Announce Partnership to Deliver Next-Generation Cognitive Search Solutions” at Markets Insider that:
“MC+A will resell Attivio’s platform, seamlessly integrate their enterprise-grade connectors into it, and provide SI services in the US market. ‘Partnering with MC+A extends our ability to address organizations’ needs for making all information available to employees and customers at the moment they need it,’ said Stephen Baker, CEO at Attivio. ‘This is particularly critical for companies looking to upgrade legacy search applications onto a modern, machine-learning based search and insight platform.’ …
The story added:
“By combining self-learning technologies, such as natural language processing, machine learning, and information indexing, the Attivio platform is helping Fortune 500 enterprises leverage customer insight, surface upsell opportunities, and improve compliance productivity. MC+A has over 15 years of experience innovating with search and delivering customized search-based applications solutions to enterprises. MC+A has also developed a connector bridge solution that allows customers to leverage existing infrastructure to simplify the transition to the Attivio platform.”
Attivio was founded in 2007, and is headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. The company’s client roster includes prominent organizations like UBS, Cisco, Citi, and DARPA. Attivio in its early days was similar in some ways to the Fast Search & Transfer technology once cleverly dubbed ESP. No, not extra sensory perception. ESP was the enterprise search platform.
Based in Chicago and founded in 2004, MC+A specializes in implementations of cognitive search and insight engine technology. A couple of years ago, MC+A was involved with Yippy, the former Vivisimo metasearch system. When IBM bought Vivisimio, the metasearch technology morphed into a Big Data component of Watson.
If this walk down memory lane suggests that vendors of proprietary systems have been working to find purchase on revenue mountain, there may be a reason. The big money, based on information available to Beyond Search, comes from integrating open source solutions like Lucene into comprehensive analytic systems.
In a nutshell, the rise of Lucene and Elastic have created opportunities for some companies which can deliver more comprehensive solutions than search and retrieval anchored in old-school solutions.
More than repositioning, jargon, and partnerships may be needed in today’s market place where “answers”, not laundry lists are in demand. For mini profiles of vendors which are redefining information access and answering questions, follow the news stories in our new video news program DarkCyber. There’s a new program each week. Plus, you can get a sense of the new directions in information access by reading my 2015 book (still timely and very relevant) CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access.
Stephen E Arnold,
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2018
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