Attivio is determined to help organizations make use of their unstructured data. After all, there’s a lot of it lying around enterprises and throughout the web.

In an effort to simplify deploying its Active Intelligence Engine for customers, Attivio is partnering with Search Technologies, a Herndon, Va.-based services and consulting firm that specializes in enterprise search implementations.

While Attivio’s AIE is much more than an enterprise search engine,  Search Technologies has significant experience working unstructured and semi-structured data, the key ingredient in unified information access.

“Attivio’s unified information access software pushes beyond search into business intelligence and process automation, based on a holistic view of structured and unstructured data,” said Kamran Khan, CEO of Search Technologies. “Our experience of optimizing unstructured data as a foundation for important search applications sits very well with Attivio’s approach, and we’re excited to be working with them.”

Specifically, Search Technologies aims to reduce the complexity associated with large enterprise search implementations by properly configuring data connectors to reduce or eliminate failed or incomplete data indexing. In addition to Attivio, the company has experience implementing Microsoft FAST and SharePoint, Google Search Appliance, and LucidWorks.

For years, unstructured data has remained locked away inside emails, PowerPoint slides, blogs and elsewhere. There are a slew of content management systems on the market that help companies manage this content, but most do not integrate with other enterprise systems, including business intelligence and reporting applications.

AIE brings unstructured data into the equation via its inverted index, which allows users to access both unstructured and structured data via SQL-like queries and/or search-style queries. The index then organizes query results — both unstructured and structured data — into tables to maintain relationships between data elements.

AIE is a platform for building user-facing applications, however, not a front-end tool in-and-of itself. Developers can build user-facing applications of varying styles — a BI-type application that returns query results in graphs and charts or a search-like interface that organizes results in according to a predefined relevance schema, for example. Attivio partners with a number of services providers to help its customers build these user-facing applications.

In addition to Search Technologies, Attivio also partners with Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Cantina consulting, among others.