I recently wrote about Attivio. It offers the Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) for Unified Information Access, bringing together business intelligence and enterprise search capabilities. (see Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access). Last week I had an interesting conversation with Attivio CEO Ali Riaz about the potential impact of the current economic crisis on technology adoption. He noted that some of the large enterprise application providers are seeing decreasing sales (see SAP Shares Slide on Earnings Warning via Jevon MacDonald). At the same time, they are finding an increasing demand at Attivio for their BI-search combination as companies want to better understand what is happening within their enterprise and customer base.

Ali mentioned a CIO UK article that noted, “As risk becomes a dirty word, look for business intelligence tools to be drafted in staunch support for strategies and for them to be increasingly used in adjunct with governance, risk, and compliance software.” He added that as companies seek to emerge from the economic downturn, the need for more and better information access, enterprise search and business solutions will be significant.

Some of the new enterprise 2.0 tools have been very useful in creating greater engagement and communication within the enterprise. However, some of these tools act in silos themselves, further adding to the information disconnect. These silos are especially strong between the traditional structured data and the newer unstructured information generated by enterprise 2.0 tools and even just in email, documents and presentations. The business results are often found in the structured data but the reasons are often contained in the unstructured information. The actionable intelligence is often found in the unstructured information but it is less meaningful taken out of the context provided by the structured data.

Attivio was designed to address these silos as it combines enterprise search with business intelligence in the same application and brings unified results. Ali said that companies are more open to change and innovation now and looking for answers. They need ways to develop true competitive differentiation, increase revenues and decrease customer churn. I recently read a similar thought by Jonathan Schwartz the Sun President and COO and long time blogger. In a recent blog post, Innovation Loves a Crisis, Jonathan shared a memo he sent to Sun’s leader about the role of technology in helping with the current economic crisis. He writes that many businesses will be most open to change now and he wants Sun to help its customers achieve greater innovation and boost productivity in response to economic challenges that many face.

Attivio wants to support innovation by providing more useful information that combines results and reasons. This is the goal of their combination of structured and unstructured information. They also add in visualization and analysis to the mix to help with the understanding. For example, he cited a pharma company with 500,000 records in a structured data system. There are comments in most of the records but there was no way to access them until they adopted Attivio to look beyond the structured data.

As they were developing AIE they put together a number of structured data base experts and an equal number of unstructured information experts. Ali said that these two groups often do not speak the same language. The structured data people felt that an unstructured search index was not reliable. The unstructured information people felt that the structured database was too limiting. By comparing methods, they were able to come up with new solutions. For example, they have helped one government agency look at blogs and government records fast enough to help with security questions at checkpoints. Compliance is another use case as enterprises traditionally had to look at email records, ERP data, and employee records in three separate searches. Attivio provides an integrated set of results.

They have also designed the system for rapid implementation so companies can experiment and make improvements as they go along. There is also flexibility so you do not get locked into a system or structure too early. This all makes sense to me. The Active Intelligence Engine was recognized on KM World’s 2008 Trend-Setting Product list and was also the winner fo this year’s KMWorld Promise award. I do think that these types of applications will be become increasingly mission critical in our connected and potentially more transparent world. Perhaps they can also tell me what is happening to my shrinking retirement(?) account.