Endeca’s Pete Bell Interviewed
March 17, 2008
Endeca broke the $100 million revenue barrier in 2007, and the company has received additional financial backing from Intel and SAP. Endeca’s Pete Bell spoke with me in March 2007 and provided substantive information and insight into Endeca’s success.
Mr. Bell said: “We’re thriving as an Information Access platform whose architecture is based on a new class of database.” At the outset of the interview, I was operating on the assumption that Endeca was a search engine. Mr. Bell’s explanation of the company’s approach gave me a fresh appreciation of the firm’s engineering prowess. For example, Mr. Bell said:
Since imitators were playing catch up, nearly everyone else grafted facets onto their existing engine, so they do things like manage facets through application-side code. If you have a thousand products and three facets, that’s could work. But it gets ugly when you need to scale or want to make changes. But since we architected for facets from the very beginning, we built it into the engine. We’ve evolved industrial strength infrastructure for this.
With news of the Intel and SAP financial support, I wanted to know what those additional funds would fuel. Mr. Bell said:
Intel and SAP give us the opportunity to plan a product roadmap today that will be ready for how enterprises look three years from now…. It’s all about multi-core — what would you do with an 80 core chip? … Intel wants visionaries to create the demand for its next generations of chips. As for SAP, their software manages a lot of the world’s most valuable data. Today, the SAP data support business processes … But as soon as you veer off from a specific process, it can be difficult to make use of those data.
You can read the complete interview with Mr. Bell on the Search Wizards Speak section of the ArnoldIT.com Web site. Key links are:
If you want more information about Endeca, click here.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2008
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