Oracle Buys Endeca for Unstructured Business Intelligence
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has announced plans to acquire Endeca Technologies, adding to its unstructured data management, ecommerce and business intelligence offerings.
Oracle envisions that the combination of Endeca and Oracle technology will lead to a converged platform of structured and unstructured data for ecommerce and business intelligence.
In a letter to customers, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for Oracle Development, wrote that “The explosion of data variety and volume, including enterprise content and application data, social media, sensor data and third-party feeds, has changed the way that companies and consumers interact and how businesses want to use this information. Unlike traditional forms of enterprise transactional data, the information contained in this data is unstructured and can be difficult to capture and analyze effectively. … By leveraging a common data management, cross channel commerce and business intelligence solution, that supports both structured and unstructured data requirements; customers are expected to improve productivity, innovation and growth.”
Kurian added, “the combination of Oracle ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences and the combination of Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca Latitude is expected to provide a comprehensive business intelligence solution that brings together information from structured and unstructured data sources.”
Oracle said that the convergence of structured and unstructured data “is driving the need for a common data management and analytics platform.”
“The combination of Oracle and Endeca is extremely compelling in this changing data environment,” said Kurian said in a statement. “Together, we will provide best-in-class technology to manage structured and unstructured data together; business intelligence tools to analyze 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 specialized applications. This technology will also allow us to integrate more comprehensive unstructured data management into Oracle’s engineered systems.”
The acquisition is expected to close before the end of 2011.
Paul Ferrill has been writing for over 15 years about computers and network technology. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering as well as a MS in Electrical Engineering. He is a regular contributor to the computer trade press. He has a specialization in complex data analysis and storage. He has written hundreds of articles and two books for various outlets over the years. His articles have appeared in Enterprise Apps Today and InfoWorld, Network World, PC Magazine, Forbes, and many other publications.