Centauri Partners is a thought leading consulting and systems integration firm deploying advanced decision insight solutions using a unified information access approach.

Unified Information Access Platforms² are search platforms that provide a single point of access to multiple heterogeneous sources of information. They form the foundation platform for search based applications. These platforms are highly scalable, and combine elements of database and search technologies in order to make information access dynamic and ad hoc, while offering the reporting and visualization features commonly found in business intelligence applications. They integrate large volumes of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured information into a unified environment for analysis and decision-making. While the vision for such integrated platforms has been around for years, products have only recently been released into the market. These emerging platforms unify access to data and content with newer, hybrid architectures that combine elements of both databases and search. Unified access applications:

1. Create hybrid data structures that combine structured data and data operators with text and semi-structured operations and analytics. They combine semantic understanding, fuzzy matching, sorting, joins, and various operations such as range searching within a single architecture, rather than federating a query to multiple sources in multiple forms.
2. Leverage these hybrid structures to provide real-time access through ad hoc queries to multiple sources of information, including information across a spectrum of formats (e.g. rich media) through a single interface.
3. Handle sparse matrices of unpredictable content.
4. Optimize interactions for consumption and decisions, processing queries faster than traditional database and/or BI applications and implementing visual consumption metaphors.
5. Scale to terabytes.
6. Provide reporting tools that are BI-like, or integrate easily with BI applications and reporting tools.

http://www.cio.com/article/602364/Five_Advantages_of_Unified_Information_Access_UIA_
2 Wikipedia:  Unified Information Access (Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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