Oracle Snaps Up InQuira

July 29, 2011

We learned from a source in Silicon Valley that Oracle has acquired InQuira. We noted “Oracle Buys InQuira to Boost Fusion CRM”. InQuira is an interesting search company. The firm was formed in 2002 from two semi successful search companies, Answerfriend Inc. and Electric Knowledge Inc. The company hit its stride with its positioning of “natural language search” for customer support applications. InQuira hit my radar screen when it signed a deal with Yahoo to power the Yahoo customer support service. I wrote about the upside and downside of the Yahoo implementation and then looked at InQuira every few months. You can run a query in Beyond Search and get a list of the articles I wrote to track the company’s activities since 2008. InQuira has been able to move forward despite the lemmings of search rushing into the customer service market.

According to the IDG News write up:

The company has patented NLP (natural language processing) capabilities that enable it to determine the “true intent” of a customer question, according to its website. “We expect InQuira to be the centerpiece for Oracle Fusion CRM Service,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of Oracle CRM, in a statement.

Our view at Beyond Search is that buying InQuira is probably a reasonable move for Oracle. The company’s Secure Enterprise Search 11g is not suited for the Fusion type of application. Oracle purchased Triple Hop, but I have lost track of that firm’s Match Point innovation within the giantness of Oracle.

Will InQuira propel Oracle forward in enterprise search in its various manifestations? My hunch is that Oracle will generate additional revenue and put pressure on the incumbents in the customer support market. Oracle may need to acquire additional search and content processing companies in order to meet the needs of the big and diverse Oracle customer base. InQuira’s approach often requires significant computational horsepower. Oracle is positioned to sell InQuira’s customers the hardware required to deliver zippy performance.

We think the notion of a giant company building a “knowledge management” solution is sort of interesting. Big companies have to buy other companies to move forward. That’s why we think Oracle may still be shopping for search and content management solutions.

Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2011

Freebie unlike products from Oracle and InQuira.

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Acquisition, Business strategy, News, Search, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.