November 3, 2009Boston Business Journal
Seasoned startup: Tech provider taps into experienced talent and partners to fuel growth
By: Sean McFadden
Read the full story below or view it at the Boston Business Journal web site.
The idea “it’s a team effort” is a familiar one for many successful companies. For Ali Riaz, that idea has particular resonance. Riaz is CEO and co-founder of Boston-based technology startup Attivio Inc., which is attempting to solve a very timely problem that has broad implications for the business intelligence/data warehousing market. Key to Attivio’s growth strategy, according to Riaz, is that there’s a highly experienced team driving that effort.
“We’re not a young, yuppie software company,” said Riaz, 43. “Our guys and girls have been around the block. A lot of sweat, blood and tears have gone into this. A lot of real-life experience.”
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine is an enterprise software platform that enables users to search for content across two data sources that Riaz said have traditionally been separate: It manages both structured content from a database (such as bank transactions) and unstructured content (including e-mail or news articles that are distributed on the Web via an RSS feed) in a single electronic information warehouse. The result is users can search for and analyze numerical- and text-related data at the same time, using a unified interface. What’s unique about Attivio, Riaz said, is that it has created and patented a next-generation data index that reproduces the database table inside of the search index.
The two-year-old company has two main customer targets: companies that build and sell software applications, which can use the AIE platform to enhance or build an application; and organizations that want to have better information-management capabilities internally and on their online properties, including publishing houses, government intelligence agencies, and finance and health care companies.
The company’s competition in this space includes legacy enterprise search engine providers, such as Autonomy and Endeca, and “all kinds of databases,” Riaz said. There are also other companies tackling the issue of “unified information access,” as it’s been called — companies much larger than his 48-person outfit, such as Oracle.
“Attivio has been very focused on designing its technology infrastructure in a way that it can be embedded into a lot of different technologies,” said Matthew Brown, vice president and research director at Forrester Research in Cambridge. “And, they’ve reduced the footprint of the technology, so it’s a fairly small install that’s easy to work with.”
Attivio has aligned itself with a high caliber of talent. For one thing, the company has assembled a technology advisory board culled from the top of academia — including University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Andrew McCallum, Brown University professor Stan Zdonik and University of California Irvine professor Ramesh Jain.
As part of a growth-through-alliances strategy, Attivio has also partnered with more than a dozen outside organizations since 2007 — from original equipment manufacturers that build and sell their own products that embed Attivio’s technology to organizations that act as value-added resellers. These partners include companies such as Netezza and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“By partnering with companies that have deep regional relationships or a global distribution footprint, Attivio has been able to penetrate accounts that normally would have taken years to establish,” Riaz said.
The heart of its operation, however, is Attivio’s staff of industry veterans. Riaz himself has operated in the worlds of search and database technology for 20 years. Following stints as CEO of the now-defunct GetConnected and president of Fast Search & Transfer (which was later acquired by Microsoft), he co-founded Attivio in 2007 with Chairman Per-Olof Soderberg, Chief Technology Officer Sid Probstein and Senior Vice President Andrew McKay.
The company raised $18.2 million in private investor funding to get started, followed by a second round of $12 million from the same source this past summer. The company has assembled the type of experienced team that can carry a high price tag: people with at least 15 years of experience. Their average age is 43. By Riaz’s count, 85 percent of the company’s costs — about $7 million annually — are labor-related.
“All of our money is allocated to a long-term strategy where the right people are going to be taken care of,” Riaz said.
Attivio’s revenue was $2.4 million in 2008, and Riaz is projecting between $6 million and $7 million this year. He expects the company to reach profitability by the middle of 2010.
The company plans to add 10 more employees by the end of the year.
Gregory Lloyd, president of Attivio client Traction Software Inc. in Providence, said, “Their technology and their market focus are right on target. ... Everything they’re doing at Attivio, they’re doing with a very sophisticated understanding of what’s needed in the marketplace — right now and going forward.”
