Not really trolling. Just following my editorial policy of capturing information in a chronological way for my own purposes. The Web log allows me to share ideas and rumors–subject to the stated editorial policy and disclaimer on my About page. In this case, the Intel Cloud Two initiative is interesting. Add to that the investment in Endeca, which is a parallel to the Intel study team’s investigation of other search technologies in 1998-1999 prior to Intel’s amazing Excalibur deal, one of my sources drew the parallels to my attention. I appreciate your providing color, but I think there will be more to the “on silicon” side of the story once the engineering team at Intel is allowed to publish. Right now, Intel is keeping a low profile, which is standard operating procedure. There appear to be some deep parallels between Intel’s research and Google’s that I find interesting. The tie up with Yahoo is very interesting, but the server and core count seems low to me.

Stephen Arnold, July 30, 2008

Let me excerpt a couple of paragraphs from a 2006 article about Convera (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/16/AR2006071600588.html):

Since 1991, the company has lost more than $1 billion. Most of the loss came in 2001 when it was forced to write off more than $900 million in an ahead-of-its-time venture with Intel Corp . to make archived video content available on the Web. That project, one of the most overblown and short-lived hype cycles in local technology history, virtually collapsed within six months of being announced — but not before Convera’s share price went from $30 to more than $65, ballooning the company’s market value to more than $1 billion before it came crashing back to earth. As of Friday, Convera was worth about $300 million. Its peak revenue year was 2000, when it had $51 million. Last year, it had $21 million.

Condo, speaking from Sun Valley on Thursday, didn’t try to spin the company’s history. “The business model around which we had built [the Intel venture] failed,” he said. “The whole world pretty much collapsed on us.”

Compare this to Endeca, which had over $100M in revenue in 2007, before taking any money from Intel. While I’m can’t comment in detail about Endeca’s financials, I can assure you that we are not losing money.

You are right to see a connection between Intel’s multi-core strategy and Endeca: Endeca’s analytics-based approach to information access takes much better advantage of CPU evolution than conventional search engines, and hence positions Endeca as a poster child for multi-core chip architecture (which is distinct from cloud computing). That’s a good reason for Intel to see Endeca not only as a good financial investment, but also as a strategic partner.

Your blog is always an interesting and provocative read. In this case, I suspect you were just trolling to see if an Endecan would come out and dispute the absurd comparison.