Endeca Buy Boosts Oracle’s Big Data Management

Continuing its strategy to enable customers to harness unstructured and Big Data better, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Endeca Technologies, a provider of unstructured data management, Web commerce and business intelligence software.

Endeca is a privately held company that provides products to help companies analyse unstructured data, gain better business intelligence and deliver a superior customer experience, Oracle said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Analytics platform

The convergence of structured and unstructured information is driving the need for a common data management and analytics platform, Oracle said. And the company is moving to address that.

At its recent Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference, Oracle announced the Oracle Big Data Appliance, an engineered system optimised for acquiring, organising and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g. Oracle also announced the Oracle NoSQL Database, a distributed, highly scalable, key-value database.

Meanwhile, the merging of Oracle and Endeca is expected to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyse structured and unstructured information together, Oracle officials said.

“The combination of Oracle and Endeca is extremely compelling in this changing data environment,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Development, in a statement. “Together, we will provide best-in-class technology to manage structured and unstructured data together; business intelligence tools to analyse structured and unstructured data together; and a broad suite of packaged applications which extends the value of unstructured data into ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, EPM, Web Commerce, and specialised applications. This technology will also allow us to integrate more comprehensive unstructured data management into Oracle’s engineered systems.”

The combination of Oracle ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising and online customer experiences. The combination of Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca Latitude is expected to provide a comprehensive business intelligence foundation and analytic applications, bringing together information from structured and unstructured data sources, Oracle said.

Unstructured data handling

Endeca’s core technology, the MDEX Engine, enables enterprises to correlate and analyse unstructured data. Endeca InFront is a customer experience management platform that enables businesses to deliver highly targeted and relevant experiences online with advanced merchandising and content targeting tools for Web commerce.

Endeca Latitude is a technology platform that enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications bringing information from many unstructured and structured information sources together.

“With more than 600 customers relying on Endeca’s solutions to deploy unified platforms for search, guided navigation, merchandising and interactive analytics of unstructured data, Endeca is recognised for its unique approach in hybrid search-analytical technology on diverse and changing information,” said Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca, in a statement.

“We bring successful deployments with large enterprises in key industries such as retail, distribution, media and publishing, government, and manufacturing and consumer packaged goods – many of these customers are also Oracle customers,” he added.