Last week, Oracle announced its intent to buy privately held Endeca. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Financial details were not disclosed.
Endeca was founded in 1999 and is most known for its e-commerce business, providing faceted search to many storefronts. Shopping for shirts? Enter “shirts” and get a list of possibilities that can be refined by brand, color, gender and so on. Faceted search provides the navigation and filtering; general search relies on simple key word matching, or in some cases, synonym translation. Most of the company’s 600 customers and $100 million in revenues come from this side of the business.
However, we recently added Endeca to our “Noteworthy Vendors” in the BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report for its extension into BI with the launch of the Latitude product in 2010. Latitude combines faceted search capabilities with dashboard delivery to bring both traditional data warehouse content together with textual or unstructured content. Indexes to multiple data sources are created in its own columnar database, the MDEX engine. Endeca Latitude is sometimes evaluated along with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and QlikView because of their search paradigms, but it is unique in its ability to handle textual data. As an example, in the accompanying screen shot, a warranty dashboard provides an overview of claims for various car types. Analysis of textual data allows a wordle graphic to show that the majority of claims involve a “warning light.” Via the left pane, a user could search for data with those key words, or could use the faceted search to filter data by odometer reading, part number, or supplier.
In talking about the acquisition, Oracle VP Thomas Kurian said, “We see Endeca MDEX as a fantastic engine helping us in every segment we are in.” Oracle expects Endeca to be a key part of its big data strategy, integrated with Oracle’s e-commerce applicaations, and integrated with OBI EE. Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca said “We will bring Endeca DNA into the Oracle organization. How far we can take it is only limited by our imagination.”
When I asked Kurian to comment on the potential overlap with Endeca given Latitude has its own front end, he presented three approaches that Oracle will support.
- OBI EE with Answers as the front-end will support the MDEX engine as a data source.
- A line of business could implement Latitude as an agile BI solution. This clearly has become a widening hole in Oracle’s BI approach as OBI EE has only gotten harder to implement with dependences on Oracle Fusion middleware and all data needs to be well-modeled up front.
- The user interface could be built in Latitude and embedded in an OBI EE Answers report or dashboard. It’s this last use case that I think could converge overtime. While Oracle added some search capabilities in 11g last year (based on Oracle Enterprise Search), it is only on indexed keywords and is a separate installation. There is no faceted navigation that would be a good enhancement to OBI EE.
Kurian says the integration and assimiliation of Endeca would be a matter of months. That sounds overly optimistic, in my opinion, at least for the first and third use cases. But I am hoping Oracle will prove me wrong.
Purely coincidentally, you can learn more about Endeca and see it in action at my TDWI Cool BI course, November 1st in Orlando, FL.
Regards,
Cindi Howson, www.biscorecard.com
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