Step Up from FAST ESP to Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE®)

Replace your end-of-life FAST ESP system with Attivio AIE – an agile, future-proof advanced enterprise search platform

END-OF-LIFE LEGACY SEARCH IS NOT AN OPTION FOR INFORMATION-CENTERED ORGANIZATIONS

According to IDC, today’s successful, leading organizations “will be information-centered.” Organizations realize more than ever that lasting success depends on the ability to easily access and act upon key information. As a result, managers are clamoring for new business insights drawn from new combinations of information types and sources – structured and unstructured, internal and external.

Organizations that cling to legacy tools, however, are at risk: Gartner warns that “existing approaches to information infrastructure are inadequate for creating business value from information sharing and reuse.” A new approach is required “to support current use cases – as well as those not yet anticipated.”2

Unfortunately, many legacy search tools are failing to keep up with burgeoning demands for new information.

In particular, FAST ESP is no longer being actively developed as a product. Now part of Microsoft, FAST ESP has been marked for end-of-life effective July 2013. All development of FAST ESP features and functionality will cease at that time.

As new information sources, including Big Data, emerge and grow at ever-increasing rates, many organizations are concluding that FAST ESP will increasingly impair efforts to be more information-centered – and instead incur needless exposure and risk.

ATTIVIO AIE: A FUTURE-PROOF PLATFORM FOR ENTERPRISE SEARCH INNOVATION

Many customers have made the strategic decision to replace FAST ESP with Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine (AIE): an agile, next-generation platform for enterprise search innovation, capable of rapidly fulfilling current and future informational needs for today’s winning, information-driven businesses.

Attivio has resolved the concerns expressed by former FAST ESP customers, by leveraging:

In-depth FAST ESP experience. Attivio’s development, professional services teams and partner network have the FAST ESP expertise vital to successfully complete even the most demanding migrations.

Powerful AIE functionality that overcomes FAST ESP technical challenges. Unlike FAST ESP, Attivio AIE freely integrates, correlates and presents all related enterprise information – structured and unstructured, internal and external, while easily managing highly complex security permissions. AIE also supports Microsoft and Linux platforms, generally requires 30% less disk space and hardware, and more.

Dedication to a dynamic product roadmap and focus on customer satisfaction – with a goal of having 100% of its clients referencable.

Attivio AIE provides maximum agility in every major aspect of advanced enterprise search in ways FAST ESP simply cannot match, including:

Schema-less, Universal Index; No “Flattening” of Data. AIE ingests all data and content into its universal index, with built-in global language processing, as well as advanced text analytics to enrich unstructured content, maximizing its findability and joinability with other data and content. AIE also ingests structured data on a table-by-table basis, unlike FAST ESP, which must “flatten” databases to ingest them, diminishing their business value.

New Insights with Highly Precise Information Access: Scope Search and Query-Time JOIN. Attivio AIE empowers users with a new level of in-depth information access and analytics beyond FAST ESP, to drive new insights and new business success.

Unlike ESP, Attivio AIE also performs relational JOINs of all related content and/or data matching a given query, with no advance modeling or pre-joining of data or content required. This groundbreaking functionality, conceived, created and patented by Attivio, is not offered by FAST ESP or any other search tool.

AIE also offers scope search for in-depth exploration of individual documents; for example, users can search for entities, keyphrases and entity sentiment within individual sentences, XML node names/attributes and other structures. However, unlike FAST ESP, Attivio AIE also allows JOINs on scope searches, combining powerful intra-document scope search with ad hoc JOINs spanning all information. AIE offers exceptionally precise information access well beyond what is possible using FAST ESP.

Flexible Active Security. AIE provides real-time permissioning, regardless of what structured and/or unstructured data is being accessed or what access tool is used- simple search, custom application, etc. AIE utilizes its query-time JOIN capability to uniquely enforce even the most complex security models with very low latency. FAST ESP uses flattening to handle security, which doesn’t scale at all. FAST uses an early binding security model which imposes huge burdens on existing security systems and significantly slows down query response times.

Reduced Hardware and Disk Space Usage. AIE is rapidly deployable and highly scalable using commodity physical servers or virtual servers. AIE's architecture support unlimited index size and query volume growth, with low disk space usage. FAST ESP requires disk space 2-5x the size of source content – with lots of hardware required. FAST ESP also has hard limits for the number of documents that can be put on a single machine, while AIE allows any number of documents, with predictable degradation in query performance. An AIE system can also be built all the way from a laptop to a datacenter with the same configuration, which is simply not possible with FAST ESP.

Flexible Workflows. AIE offers out-of-the-box workflows to prepare content for processing, including text analytics. Workflows support iterative processing and sub-flows, and are written in Java. Additional transformations may be created or extended within existing workflows, or entirely new workflows may be created. With FAST ESP, there is very little flexibility in configuring pipelines, as they are practically “locked down” once written. The development language used to create pipelines is Python – a tougher skillset to hire than Java.

Event-Driven Monitoring and Management. AIE uses event-driven visualization capabilities that let analysts immediately understand what’s happening on large, multi-node systems; FAST ESP doesn’t provide this capability. As AIE executes workflows, enhanced systems and performance monitoring tools provide a unified view of all relevant metrics. Customizable graphical displays of key parameters stream in real time to correlate events and system behavior, providing critical insight to massive, mission-critical environments.

Future-Proof Platform. Attivio is 100% focused on unified information access, which integrates, combines and presents all enterprise information, regardless of data type or original source. Attivio has an active product roadmap supported by its dedicated in-house development team, and highly responsive customer service.

ATTIVIO AIE: UNMATCHED ENTERPRISE SEARCH & ANALYTIC AGILITY – RIGHT NOW

Organizations can’t wait: managers are clamoring for new insights, drawn from the entire spectrum of enterprise information – structured and unstructured, internal and external. Unlike FAST ESP, Attivio AIE provides this vital functionality – right now. Attivio AIE eliminates enterprise information silos and creates new, active business value from all information assets, to rapidly fulfill the current and future needs of today’s leading organizations.

Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02460 USA

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