Semantic Search technology leader launches Ontology 4 to apply the power, simplicity and speed of search to all business application data across the enterprise

London, UK & Nice, France – May 14, 2013: Today at TM Forum Management World, Ontology Systems, the semantic search company for structured enterprise application data, announce the immediate availability of Ontology 4, the semantic search platform that replaces data integration.

Ontology 4 completes vision of “Search, don’t Integrate” by incorporating unstructured as well as structured application data, it enables businesses to search and link applications, databases, files, spreadsheets and ad-hoc data from anywhere across the enterprise; without the cost and risk of integration and deliver solutions in record time.

“Today, the Holy Grail for enterprises across the globe is a ‘360 degree view of their business through their data’, and like the Holy Grail itself, this 360 view has eluded most businesses,” claims Benedict Enweani, CEO of Ontology Systems. “The real-world constraints of risky, painful, expensive data integration projects simply kill most attempts to unify business entities across the enterprise.”

Paul Turner, Data Integrity Manager at Ericsson UK noted: “Ontology’s semantic search-led approach enabled Ericsson to quickly and relatively easily combine device and configuration data to provide a single, accurate view of network misalignments – something we believed was not achievable using traditional integration approaches.”

Daniel Schultz, Team Manager – Infrastructure Services at Internet Solutions, and Ontology’s  first customer, explained:  “Since first using Ontology in 2009, we have been able to unify and search data across our business more rapidly and easily than possible through traditional integration.  The data agility Ontology brings our business, and the maturing of the Rothko project vision into Ontology 4, makes data available to more of our users, gives us a hard competitive edge and a strategic way forward with our IT systems.”   

Phinda Ncala, CIO at Neotel, who won a 2012 innovation award with Ontology for their Service Management deployment, said:  “Using Ontology we are able to unify structured billing data with unstructured data locked away in customer contract and SLA documents.  The data is delivered in a dashboard to our CSRs who now respond accurately to billing disputes.  The materialisation of Ontology’s Rothko vision into Ontology 4 has shortened billing dispute resolution times, improved accuracy and has enabled us to increase customer satisfaction through timely access to accurate data.”

Ontology 4 completely side steps traditional data integration technologies of rigid schemas and data models that fail to embrace the dynamic, diverse data estates in modern businesses. Instead, Ontology 4 uses semantic technology to examine the data held in sources right across the business, adds an organisation’s knowledge of the data, and produces a semantic model of the business’ entities. The result is a searchable graph allowing business users to search for “Things”, i.e. linked business concepts and not just “Strings” of text., as is the case with a text based search engine.

“Ontology is dispelling the myth that integrating disparate IT systems and data can only be achieved through lengthy point-to-point integration, MDM, ETL, BI or DQ projects, “ explains Nancee Ruzicka, Chief Strategist at analyst firm, ICT Intuition. “Using a search model to centralize and align data from anywhere across the enterprise offers a level of data agility that businesses now need to remain competitive.”

Ontology 4 is built to five key principles that separate it from traditional data integration technologies:

1.No schema - Ontology uses a searchable, semantic model built on proven graph-based technology.

2.No Integration - Ontology uses a semantic model to find and combine data relating to business entities fragmented across the enterprise.

3.No Big Bang - Ontology’s semantic model embraces on-going changes while delivering value early and iteratively over the duration of a project.

4.No Search Restriction - Ontology’s semantic search find's information across application data, documents and emails.

5.No Upfront Risk. – No integration to data sources, No unnecessary tying up of team resources, No feasibility surprises, and No problem changing project requirements.


“The Internet is the world’s largest source of data, yet no one integrates it.  They search it,” concluded Enweani. “So, when it comes to enterprise data, we say ‘Search, don’t Integrate.”

Ontology 4 products
Ontology Systems ship two products built on the Ontology 4 platform: Ontology Intelligent 360, which is capable of real-time search and dependency mapping, and Ontology Integrity Manager which is used for data alignment, migration, reporting and other analysis-based applications. Both are available via hosted SaaS solution or perpetual license.

Ontology 4 solutions
The Ontology 4 products are used to deliver solutions in three cross-industry spaces:  Business Dependency Mapping, Data Alignment and 360 Single View - the “Big Picture”.

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