Attivio

"The how, the why, the what of business" with Attivio & Tableau


Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) is a unified information access platform, helping customers connect many different kinds of valuable information—internal and external, structured and unstructured, from documents, email and social interactions to spreadsheets and databases and more.

In this video, Rik Tamm-Daniels, Vice President of Technology for Attivio, discusses how Attivio pairs with Tableau to help customers see and understand unstructured valuable data that used to be considered “impossible.”

Tableau: Can you explain the value in helping businesses analyze their unstructured data?
Rik Tamm-Daniels, Vice President of Technology: Business users, I think, for a long time have known that sources like email and documents do contain relevant information about the business … but the technology hasn't allowed them to look at it. And they've even kind of stopped asking for it because the technology was too limiting.

Unstructured social data combines with structured data to deliver valuable insight

Now with the big data movement and big content, we've been able to bring that information in a very rapid way to those end users and really start delivering on those business cases and driving that forward.

Tableau: What would you say is the value of using Tableau with Attivio?
Rik: Understanding the nature of data is really important—and applying the right technology to cost-effectively and efficiently get the insight that's relevant to the business out of it.

And that's exactly what we do with Tableau. When we go into a customer or a prospect and we look at their data, it's not ‘Here's your data, we can slice and dice it this way.’ It's ‘What is the business story we can tell here?’

Tableau: How do customers react when you show them the business story?

Tableau is fantastic as a partner—as a key element for our customers. It sounds a little cheesy, but the satisfaction of creating a dashboard that opens someone's eyes—it's a thing of beauty.

Rik: They see directly how they're going to benefit from bringing this information together and visualizing it. How it's going to show them the outliers. How it's going to show them the trends and allow them to—because they have the full context of unstructured and structured together—to actually not only see the outlier, see the trends, but drill into them to understand the why, the how and the what.

The nature of our system, the way we can bring data together, and using Tableau as a front-end, you can have very agile BI implementations that augment what people are doing with their data warehouses. So you deliver the data faster to the end users as they're exploring, as they're discovering, as part of an overall analytic practice.

They're able to gain competitive advantage by leveraging data, leveraging information in ways that their competitors out in the field are not. It's really about not even just a gradual evolution but a whole sea change in how they look at data, how they visualize it and how they drive business value from it.

Tableau is fantastic as a partner—as a key element for our customers. It sounds a little cheesy, but the satisfaction of creating a dashboard that opens someone's eyes—it's a thing of beauty.