Antara Mussol: concept-based, collaborative monitoring that turns information into decisions

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.

No. Support is included in the price, along with other resources such as the User Academy. You also don’t need to worry about updates to the application or the browser extension. Updates are installed automatically and are included in the price.

No. Antara is designed so your team can configure and evolve the setup independently—without relying on us for day-to-day changes.

Most adjustments can be handled directly in the platform, such as:

• updating monitoring scopes and focus areas

• managing concepts, synonyms and context exclusions in the thesaurus

• refining filtering rules to reduce noise

• setting up dashboards, newsletters and report structures

• managing roles, permissions and workflows

When you want to move faster or tackle a more complex rollout, Antara (and selected partners) can support you with best-practice guidance and structured onboarding; but ownership stays with your team.

Training depends on the user’s role (we support up to six user levels), but most users don’t need formal training. They can get started immediately with short onboarding videos and quick, role-specific articles.

Users who configure and manage the platform do need a deeper understanding. If they self-learn, it typically takes one to two weeks to become confident and set up the system properly.

For these users, Antara offers an optional 15-hour training course, purchased separately and delivered either online or in person. It’s not just about features: during the course we configure Antara together and leave it running for your specific use case. See Antara’s support services for details.

Antara is an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) solution. Therefore, the information it retrieves is public, except for the extraction of data from subscription-based or paid services (obtained using the client’s subscription).

However, the way our users monitor their environment reveals a great deal about their strategy, which is why Antara is strongly committed to safeguarding the confidentiality of its clients’ information.

This commitment has led us to implement the following security measures:

• Secure communication and information access protocol.
• User authentication with different user levels, each with increasing permissions. Administrators can assign levels based on user responsibilities, limiting the risk of sabotage or internal errors.
• User passwords are encrypted. Neither authorised Antara staff nor any potential unauthorised access can know the access credentials. Administrators do not assign passwords to users, nor do they know them; they are generated and managed individually by each user.
• Antara’s Support service, with access to the client’s account, is user-controlled — giving the client full privacy — and configurable, meaning Antara support technicians receive only the level of authorisation the client decides.
• Cloud-based service. Antara has been developed as a native SaaS application. This means it is based on an infrastructure with a single database for all users across all clients. It is deployed in the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. The servers are physically located in the EU, and therefore legally subject to European Union privacy regulations. Antara follows AWS’s shared responsibility security model, and the security recommendations of Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Data Protection & Privacy.
• Disaster recovery. Antara’s advanced AWS configuration allows for the automatic replacement of any active server in the event of a failure, dynamically allocating new resources without users losing information or noticing any decrease in service quality. AWS is a secure technology platform with recognised certifications and audits, including PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and SOC 1 (formerly SAS 70 and/or SSAE 16), as well as SOC 2 audit reports.

A detailed document describing the security procedures is available upon request.

See also the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.

No. Antara operates entirely in the browser.

You only need to install the browser extension, which offers a wide range of very practical features.

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.