Oracle to buy Endeca

Mike Davis, Ovum Senior Analyst

AUSTRALIA: Oracle is buying enterprise search specialist Endeca, despite having its own capable but lacklustre secure enterprise search (SES) product.

We believe it is about time that Oracle ‘bit the bullet’ and gained itself some high end capabilities, and a referenceable customer base for enterprise search, rather than continuing to develop SES.

The overlap/convergence with Oracle's business intelligence offerings, and its other enterprise applications should produce some interesting solutions, in what Oracle is already referring to as unstructured data analytics.

However, Endeca was the last of the 'big' independent enterprise search engines (Autonomy and FAST having already been swallowed by HP and Microsoft respectively) and we believe this continues to illustrate that even the biggest software companies often fail to get their innovation fast enough internally.