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June 8, 2015

Attivio Upgrade Looks to Speed Data Integration

Business intelligence experts are spending an inordinate amount of time on data integration, the profiling, identification and combining of relevant data from disparate sources for analysis.

Attivio, Newton, Mass., which bills itself as a self-service data discovery acceleration vendor, rolled out the last version of its software platform on Monday (June 8) that is said to reduce business intelligence and big data projects from months and weeks to minutes. The data source discovery software provides an index of information sources and content types within an enterprise to speed data integration. Along with the profiling capability, the software blends automation with a “self-service approach” to data identification and unification, the company said.

The combination of automation and manual intervention is said to enable data scientists and business analysts to spot and combine data tables they select from a universal index. The self-service approach is touted as reducing the amount of time spent on manual data integration, thereby accelerating business intelligence initiatives.

Moreover, the Attivio 5 platform combines traditional enterprise search capabilities with business intelligence tools to profile, identify and index structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. Attivio said the platform is aimed primarily at data-intensive industries like financial services, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.

Attivio said Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotechnology product development company, would join as a client for the launch of Attivio 5, joining other clients that include Qualcomm, UBS, GE, Nexen and National Instruments.

The software platform also attempts to address the steady blurring of business intelligence and big data projects, particularly as use cases intersect and overlap.

What is needed in areas like application development and delivery, according to market analyst Forrester Research, is a flexible data platform that is able to extract the best out of each approach. The market researcher estimates that as much as 80 percent of business intelligence projects focus on data integration tasks. It takes a similar amount of time and effort within the data integration process “just to identify and profile data sources,” according to Forrester.

Those requirements are only expected to grow as the amount of unstructured data piles up in an organization’s IT infrastructure.

Attivio’s response is a new version of its unified information access platform designed to allow users to track down different kinds of data in a single SQL or simple search query. The company’s “active intelligence engine” indexes and combines structured and unstructured data and content to provide context.

The goal of the upgraded software platform is to enable “enterprises to gain immediate visibility into all of their information, even their dark data” Attivio CEO Stephen Baker said in a statement. The automated profiling of structured and unstructured content also is designed to allow data scientists and business analysts to adopt Attivio’s faster self-service approach to identifying and combining data, Baker added, reducing the amount of time spent on manual data integration.

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