Endeca means business in enterprise search

Enterprise search vendor Endeca has announced its latest platform and signalled its intentions to take on not only its traditional rivals in the search market, but also business intelligence (BI) vendors. Endeca Information Access Platform 5.0 is a major release for the Florida based company and incorporates some major new search technology.

"The average business information user has been relegated to a dashboard for business intelligence," said Jeff Boehm, director of BI market strategy for Endeca. "End users are looking for a more simplistic tool," he said, adding that Endeca believes that with this latest platform it sees itself competing with large established BI vendors like Cognos .

Endeca has entered into this space because it believes that existing BI tools are complex and require heavy integration by the IT departments, as well as significant training for end users to successfully retrieve and use the data they generate. Enterprise search vendors have for some time coveted the BI space as a potential next step for their information retrieval tools and Boehm believes the market is ripe now, with large numbers of end users within organisations looking for a search tool that will perform BI analysis retrieval, but does not require training.

"We are not really seeing Autonomy and Fast in the BI area yet," Boehm said.

Endeca competes head on with the major enterprise search players Fast Search & Transfer and Autonomy, as well entrants Oracle and Microsoft. Boehm said the company was increasing its focus on the UK and European markets and would be announcing a new high level executive to re-energise its presence here.

In developing Endeca Information Access Platform 5.0 the company has centred its development on three principals of information discovery, it said, these being relationship discovery, enterprise integration and user control.

Endeca has retained its Guided Navigation tool , which provides a constantly updating list of related information according to search terms within the results view. A new Concept Visualisation tool has been developed which provides users with a tag cloud view of related information. A Treemap compliments the Concept Visualisation tools, providing users with bar graph style charts of related information.

"The customer chooses how much of the visualisation is available to its users," Boehm said. "We are not saying that one size fits all for visualisation. "

Despite its own increasing presence in the enterprise search market, IT giants IBM has chosen the new Endeca platform for sales team monitoring within its IBM Global Services group, the business consultancy. IBM are using the application to connect the right consultants to a client's needs.

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