Former Fast President Launches Search StartupFormer Fast President Launches Search Startup

Does the world need another enterprise search engine? Former Fast Search and Transfer president Ali Riaz thinks so, and on Wednesday he officially unveiled his startup, Attivio, and its first product.

The difference between Attivio's engine and other enterprise search offerings, Riaz claimed in an interview, is that it was built from the ground up to tackle the bigger problem of inadequate data integration that typically happens with search.

Riaz isn't wasting any time getting an offering out the door. He was at Fast -- which Microsoft is in the process of acquiring for $1.2 billion -- for six years before leaving for a one-year stint as CEO of e-commerce platform vendor GetConnected Inc. He left last August, shortly before WhiteFence acquired GetConnected, to form Attivio.

Rather than focusing its technology development on traditional search issues, such relevancy tuning and natural language processing, Attivio is more focused on helping businesses find information across an organization without breaking up the relationships among data, or having to move one type of data into a different format to be searched. Riaz describes the company's main product, Active Intelligence Engine, as a universal repository with an analytics layer and search capabilities. Another way to look at it, he said, is that Attivio provides a virtualization layer that lets businesses search both structured data, such as database fields, and unstructured data, such as e-mail. Attivio has 22 employees, coming from Fast, AltaVista, Hummingbird, Sybase, and elsewhere.

Attivio is working with some early customers, such as an online resume posting service that charges job seekers a monthly fee. The customer is using Attivio's engine to link resume searches to its billing system. As a result, potential employers searching for resumes will first see those of job candidates who are paying a premium fee for the service, Riaz explained. Attivio also is helping a pharmaceutical firm build a process that lets users search for information in both a large structured database and free text located in a comments section of the database.

Yet Fast, Autonomy, and other enterprise search engine companies have been working to improve data integration and business intelligence capabilities in their offerings for the past year or two, so it remains unclear exactly how Attiviio is different. Riaz insists that it is, based on his deep knowledge of the area and the work his engineers are doing to create a next-generation search engine. "Our Active Intelligence Engine is a hybrid of business intelligence, database, and search," he said. A true hybrid, he added, needs to be built that way from the ground up. Riaz's tasks will be convincing potential customers that Attivio really has a new and better approach.