What Do Search Buy Outs Mean?

March 21, 2012

I worked through the 75 profiles I maintain on search and content processing vendors. Here’s a list of the Big Dogs in search in Year 2000 and what happened to these companies since this date.

Original Name	Buyer	Comment
Autonomy	Hewlett Packard	“A baby tiger”
Blossom	Available	Hosted search
Brainware	Lexmark	Back office
Convera	Out of business	Parts sold off
dtSearch	Available	Low cost leader
Endeca	Oracle	Unclear
Exalead	Dassault Systèmes	Unclear
Fast Search	Microsoft	An add in for SharePoint
Innerprise	GoDaddy	Search
InQuira	Oracle	Unclear
Inxight Software	SAP property	Unclear
Isys Software	Lexmark	Unclear
Mindbreeze	Part of Fabasoft	Replacement for SharePoint search
Mondosoft	SurfRay	On shelf
Ontolica	SurfRay	Replacement for SharePoint search
Panoptic	Squiz	Now Funnelback
Recommind	Available	In and out of enterprise search
Stratify	Autonomy	Formerly Purple Yogi
Teratext	SAIC	Unclear
Thunderstone	Available	Enterprise search
TREX	SAP	Unclear
TripleHop	Oracle	Unclear
Vivisimo	Available	Customer support

This is a selected list. These 22 companies provide a snapshot of what’s happened in enterprise search in the last 12 years. Some observations:

First, in the list of 22 entries, I have used the word “unclear” as a comment eight times. The reason is that I am not sure how the technology will be deployed or if the technology has been orphaned (TREX) or held in reserve (Mondosoft). How does one apply a “system” to a search system (Dassault Exalead)?

Second, of this set of 22 companies which I have written about in Enterprise Search Report (2004 to 2006), Beyond Search (Gilbane), and The New Landscape of Search (Pandia in Oslo), five have not been acquired to my knowledge. One wonders if and when these search vendors will be taken off the table.

Third, the list begs the questions, “What are the next wave of search and content processing companies to be purchased, merged, or integrated into a larger entity?” Great question and one which I will not answer in a free blog post.

My thoughts, before they slip away, are:

With the interest in open source search, what will be the long term revenue and cost picture for proprietary search solutions?
Will content analytics vendors become the “new search vendors”? IBM’s use of Lucene for its various search solutions provides a suggestion of this shift in its Content Analytics product.
How will the companies which have acquired search technology make money from these purchases AND be able to invest in the research and development necessary to keep the systems in step with licensee requirements? Frankly, I don’t know. There is only so much money available to pump into the black hole of information retrieval for technology, which is some cases is almost 25 years young.

Net net: Okay, lots of company have acquired search and retrieval systems. Now what? Not my problem.

Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2012

Comments

One Response to “What Do Search Buy Outs Mean?”

Charlie Hull on March 21st, 2012 6:15 am

Slight error- HP bought Autonomy, not Oracle. I agree with ‘Unclear’ though 🙂

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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.