Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search

October 25, 2011

Autonomy blew past Endeca with its acquisition strategy, revenue growth, and take no prisoners sales tactics. Now Oracle is compressing 10 to 12 years of Autonomy craftsmanship into a week or two of Internet time. The most recent acquisition by the database vendor is RightNow, a now cloud loving customer support vendor. Instead of the on premises craziness, a company wanting to chop customer support costs and reduce customer churn can license RightNow. Oracle is going to be the proud owner of RightNow.

You can read some of the details in “Oracle Buys Cloud-based Customer Service Company RightNow For $1.5 Billion”. RightNow, like Endeca, dates from the late 1990s. My hunch is that there will not be massive investment in RightNow’s technology. The customer list is the big asset.

Step back.

Oracle Text has roots in Artificial Linguistic’s technology from the late 1980a. (I bet the real search experts and the azure chip crowd in New York know all about this system. Hey, that’s why azure chip consultants are so darned successful. Legends in their own minds.) Oracle owns TripleHop, InQuira, and Endeca. Toss in the customer relationship management systems and those systems authorized vendors of search, and you have a collection of finding and tagging technology that makes OpenText search profligacy look downright abstemious.

My take away is that Oracle’s senior management took another look at Autonomy, considering the $10 or $12 billion price tag. Instead of making fun of Hewlett Packard, Oracle seems to have concluded that it needed to follow a similar strategy. Just on an accelerated schedule.

Can Oracle match Autonomy’s financial performance? Does Oracle have Autonomy’s management skill?

Quite a battle will be waged by two giants who care little about search and everything about taking business from the other. That’s the sprit of financial crisis capitalism.

Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2011

Comments

One Response to “”

rightnow - Untitled on October 31st, 2011 12:56 pm

[…] Follow this link: Untitled […]

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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.