Oracle expands BI reach with Endeca buy

Oracle has announced plans to acquire enterprise search and business intelligence (BI) firm Endeca for an undisclosed sum, in a move that could expand its business intelligence (BI) and customer experience management offerings.

Endeca's flagship technology, the MDEX Engine, allows enterprises to correlate and analyse unstructured data.

"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," said Oracle development executive vice president, Thomas Kurian.

Ovum analyst Mike Davis told V3 that Oracle will particularly benefit from Endeca's Latitude BI tool, since Oracle already has its own enterprise search product – Secure Enterprise Search – that it has recently embedded in some of its most popular products, such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

For this reason, Davis said that once the acquisition is approved, Oracle is likely to offer customers a choice between its own search technology, and the Endeca search engine.

Endeca's Latitude capabilities, meanwhile, are likely to be integrated with the Oracle BI portfolio, which stems back to its Hyperion purchase in 2007.

While Endeca does have a footprint in the BI market, because of its strong search capabilities it does not specialise in dashboards and visual functionality, and is not a pure BI market buy. As such, Davis said Endeca is unlikely to significantly grow Oracle's BI market share.

"Endeca is unlikely to make a major difference to Oracle's position in the BI market, in terms of customer base," he said.

"It will give Oracle a better analytics engine for enterprise apps but the purchase is not enough to make Oracle the number one in BI by any means."