Attivio Migration: Time is ticking to consider and execute your strategy

When migrating away from an Attivio Active Insight Engine (AIE) implementation, there are many considerations to keep front of mind. Here is a non-encompassing list:

Get an understanding on the Data Migration efforts

A Lucene or other search index is not designed or intended to be a system of record.  Because of this, the first step in your migration planning is to make sure that all source systems for your use case are still available.  If they are, you will need to remap the data flow to the replacement search system. If they are not, that is the topic of another article. After confirming the data sources, you need to get a general size of all the repositories in storage and documents. Knowing these two data points helps properly sizing any potential replacements.

Perform a Map/Gap Feature Mapping

Attivio’s AIE was a feature rich platform. Unfortunately, in our experience, most customers did not utilize all the features. Review the requirements for the original use case. Are they still relevant (pun intended)? Review your analytics. How are users querying the platform? Understanding this will help you understand what features are vital and what can be prioritized for later enhancement (looking at you NLP). With the set of must-have features, you can begin to align around a replacement technology.  There are several great technologies out there and depending on your use case, it is just a matter of finding the right fit or features and value. If you need help with making this evaluation, Contact us for a free 1-hour assessment.

AIE allowed for significant customizations.  We thought of it at the time as the search engine for Search Engineers.  It was readily extensible, which most Search Engineers would, in our experience, take advantage of.  Because of this extensibility, evaluate the level of customization done for your AIE.  These customizations, in most cases, do not need to be migrated.  Today, search systems are effectively just an end point.  As such, you only need to maintain the feature and not the workflow.  Completing this exercise will help you build out requirements for a “like for like or better” or lift and shift migration.

Review User Interfaces & Integrations

Search is a user experience driven technology.  As such, review all the integration points that consume and expose the index to users.  Identify these systems, applications, and workflows, and plan for how to integrate the new system seamlessly with them.  Reviewing interfaces and interactions is also a great time to review any Audit or compliance requirements.

Performance and Scalability

As part of your replatforming project, make sure to review your use case’s nonfunctional requirements.  How much data are you consuming?  How much data is in the index?  What is the rate of data updates? What are your historical average queries per second (QPS) your implementation handled?  Are your business needs the same?

Security and Compliance

Search technologies in many use cases, and those of AIE, are like databases.  Review your security and compliance requirements, such as data encryption, access controls, auditing, and regulatory compliance. Ensure that the new system provides the necessary security measures and compliance standards required by your organization.

Current Operating Capabilities

Search at its core is a complex technology stack. Evaluate staff and determine how capable they are and if their workload allows them to participate in a migration. The learning curve to new technology and particularly the latest Artificial Intelligence integrated within Insight Engines will require adjustments to your support team.  Will you need outside assistance?  Vendor Professional Services are limited, and open-source technologies do not have the same direct support that commercial solutions do.

Cost and Licensing

What can your current budget support?  Is it CapEx or OpEx?  Vendors are typically going to a subscription model, either with you self-hosting or them providing a sort of cloud / managed environment.  Understanding your budget lets you begin to look at the tactical approach to replacing the technology.

Vendor / Software Evaluation

We’ve given our opinions on Search RFPs. In general, most Magic Quadrant technologies can handle the use case.  Some are better than others; but, in the end, what does one connector missing mean for a 5+ year relationship?  As a reseller of several of these technologies, we can provide the most accurate sizing and best license and technology for your use case.  Contact us if you would like some assistance.