September 20, 2008

Attivio update

I talked w/ Andrew McKay of Attivio for 2 ½ hours Thursday. I’ve also been working with some Attivio engineers on a blog search engine. I think it’s time to post about Attivio. 🙂

In its full conception, the Attivio Intelligence Engine is something like Endeca + RDBMS + search engine + XML store + cool extra features. And all with seamless, lightweight, integrated installation and administration. That’s the goal, anyway. At this point, naturally, each individual piece is far from complete. For example:

Even in its early days, Attivio has had some nice-sounding customer successes. There are 8 paying Attivio customers, including 2 > $1 million deals, one half-millionish dollar deal, and 1 large OEM. 3 represent actual deployments, with the rest in development. More sales are on the way, as are permissions to disclose customer names that people will actually recognize. Customer application stories Andrew told me about include:

Since the major RDBMS (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2) all have text search and XML subsystems, they can in principle do everything Attivio does on the back end, and with a lot more features and maturity. The same would go for Marklogic. Performance and overhead might be different matters, however; Andrew certainly believes so.

Except that Lucene is included on the search side, I haven’t actually figured out how Attivio stores data. The fact that SQL features are being added incrementally suggests Attivio is rolling its own relational database capability, but how it’s organized I don’t really know.

Comments

7 Responses to “Attivio update”

  1. pakau@comcast.com on September 20th, 2008 1:23 pm

    Can you list any public facing sites that run on Attivio? Don’t you think that when you promote a product, it is a good idea to give some examples?

  2. Dave Kellogg on September 20th, 2008 3:02 pm

    Hi Curt,

    If it’s really “Endeca + RDBMS + search engine + XML store + cool extra features” don’t you wonder how 20 guys built it in a year?

    I’m guessing either it’s more light than heat at this point.

    On verra.

  3. Curt Monash on September 20th, 2008 3:40 pm

    Pakau,

    At Attivio as at many small companies, one gets many more customer names in confidential conversation than one does for publication. That said, Attivio claims only 3 functioning deployments total right now, which may or may not be so few as to automatically rule them out of any buying decision of yours.

    CAM

  4. Curt Monash on September 20th, 2008 4:22 pm

    Dave,

    I thought I indicated pretty clearly that they haven’t completely built it all yet.

    Best,

    CAM

  5. Mihran Shahinian on September 22nd, 2008 9:10 am

    Attivio engine is an inverted term engine that is capable of performing classic relational queries in a single engine without “Bolting Lucene and MySQL together” as Mr. Kellogg describes in his post here http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-thoughts-on-category-creation-and.html
    It also does have clever faceting that performs extremely well under high load. In addition plenty of traditional search features such as geo search, etc, etc are packed inside the engine.

    Regards,
    Mihran

  6. Sid Probstein on September 22nd, 2008 12:47 pm

    Dave: my first post on the new Attivio.com blog is aimed right at your question: http://www.attivio.com/attivio/blog.html.

    Pakau: you’ll get the opportunity to see Attivio in action on public sites (and embedded some amazing applications) later this year. If you’d like to evaluate our products personally just visit Attivio.com and request a demo.

    Regards,
    –Sid Probstein
    CTO @ Attivio

  7. Open issues in database and analytic technology | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on February 2nd, 2010 1:12 am

    […] for text integrated into RDBMS (limited by the weakness of those integrations), and something like Attivio’s Java SDK. There’s a major conceptual barrier in building those apps, namely the unpredictability of […]

Leave a Reply




Feed including blog about text analytics, text mining, and text search Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.