From scattered information to shared competitive intelligence

Yes. You can try out the application in a private or shared environment for a limited time. But remember, it is a very powerful application with many options, and you will not have had any training yet, so an Antara expert will guide you.

 It’s recommended, but not essential.

Self-training resources are available: our User Academy includes over 100 videos in Spanish and English, packed with recommendations and step-by-step configuration strategies.

While not all Antara clients require services to digitalise their Intelligence Function, Competitive Intelligence is much more than simply using software to run searches; it’s about structuring your view of the environment, assigning responsibilities, and coordinating the generation of collective intelligence in day-to-day operations.

It’s far easier to do this within Antara’s training ecosystem and/or that of our partners. They are experts who will apply their knowledge to make your organisation smarter.

The training required depends on the user’s role (there are up to six different user levels), but the vast majority of users only need a 15-minute explanation. For this, you have access to videos and articles created specifically for them.

Users with application configuration permissions do require a deeper level of knowledge, and it is estimated that they will need one or two weeks to learn and configure the system if doing it on their own.

For them, Antara offers a 15-hour course, delivered either in person or online, during which you not only learn the functions but also configure the application together, leaving it fully operational for your specific case. Check the support services offered by Antara.

No. You will be completely independent, not only in shaping your multilingual vocabulary, information needs, and source library, but also in connecting the application to other services, such as your corporate intranet or the email accounts where you receive newsletters, to name just a few examples.

Google or Perplexity are excellent services, but you should not rely on them to run an organisation’s Competitive Intelligence processes. Competitive Intelligence defines an entire cycle that includes setting the focus, searching and processing (filtering), business-focused analysis, information distribution, and feedback.

Google or Perplexity can support the Search phase and help in building the state of the art. Beyond that, you will need to automate the monitoring of your environment.

In particular, keep the following principles in mind:

• These solutions do not understand your business. You cannot explain your environment to them, nor your intelligence focus areas. The information they capture will not be able to identify whether it represents potential threats or opportunities. You could try to manage this with advanced search, but you will soon find it impossible.
• They decide which sources are relevant in your case. They do not structure information based on the profile of the publisher. They don’t care if it’s a competitor (which they don’t know) or a loudmouth with many blog followers. Google will give you hundreds of thousands (millions) of results, prioritised according to its own criteria, which will never be yours. Relevant information will remain hidden in the volume, and you will not be able to automatically filter information according to your business.
• To them, you are a single user, not a team. You cannot set rules for assigning topics to people, nor define the level of responsibility and involvement each person has by topic. You cannot coordinate a team that collaborates on describing the business and the topics each person specialises in. You will not be able to work together to analyse market signals collaboratively. They do not provide tools to generate intelligence reports from cooperative work, nor to set different permission levels: who can organise, modify, collaborate, or read information depending on the intelligence focus areas you set. You will have to forward information one by one, manually, to the relevant people, and you will never know whether your effort is being leveraged — or whether parts of the company are being overlooked or people are failing to carry out their analysis role.
• With those search engines, you focus on finding information, not on analysing it. Without a professional platform, more than 60% of resources dedicated to monitoring are spent on capturing and filtering information, leaving very few resources for the value-added tasks that make a real difference to the company’s business: Analysis, Recommendations, and Action.
• Finally, note that you can use Google or Google Scholar as an information source for Antara. Therefore, you do not need to choose between one method or the other — you can leverage their synergy with Antara.

These solutions are market information providers that you can integrate into Antara. Antara offers you a hub where you can centralise your information sources, process them in a consistent way, and automatically distribute alerts to the right people.

Bear in mind that those providers deliver the same information to your competitors. You need distinctive information and early alerts to stand out and gain an advantage.

In the future, if you choose to do so, you may decide to save the annual cost of some or all of your information providers, as some of our clients already do.