Endeca gets $15M from Intel Capital, SAP

In a bid to align itself with two technology titans, enterprise search firm Endeca said Wednesday it received a $15 million investment from Intel and SAP.

The cash infusion into Endeca, whose clients include Ford, Wal-Mart, and the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency, comes about two weeks after Microsoft acquired rival Fast Search & Transfer for $1.2 billion.

Endeca Chief Executive Steve Papa said the company, which in November reported its 19th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, had no pressing need for the funding but is seeking closer ties to business software maker SAP and its 43,000 customers and semiconductor giant Intel and its dual-core technology.

"It's not just that they're giants, but what they do that's so important for information access," he said, citing the impact of Intel's dual-core technology on complex data searches.

Lisa Lambert, managing director for Intel Capital's software and solutions group, said Endeca is a good fit from a financial and strategic perspective.

"They've made tremendous progress on a [profit and loss] basis," she said. "People want to know where the data sits to make decisions."

On the strategic side, she noted that Endeca's multi-threaded application can serve as a showcase as Intel goes beyond the current quad-core architecture on the semiconductors that power servers.

"This s a processor intensive application," Ms. Lambert said. "On the whole, this is a good marriage. They need more cores and we have more cores to give it."

The new relationships, however, don't preclude Endeca from hammering out similar bonds with a company like Oracle, which competes in the business software marketplace against SAP.

"We're absolutely open to Oracle in a similar relationship," Mr. Papa added. Endeca also is backed by investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency,

In addition to Fast, Endeca competes with enterprise specialists like Autonomy as well as consumer search king Google. Unlike the advertising-supported consumer model, Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.


Mr. Papa said enterprise information access is a different and far more interpretive process than consumer search.

Rather than "dump information on you," information access seeks to uncover and present relationships in the disparate forms of structured and unstructured data found in an enterprise. In September, the company also added functions that allow user-generated content to enhance search for retail and online media customers.

In a podcast, AMR Research Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson called Endeca one of Boston's hot tech stories that went from one customer, Fidelity Investments, in 2001 to 500 as of early 2008.

In one instance, Mr. Richardson noted, Endeca set up a search system for a government client whose data set had 10 million records each with 22,000 attributes.

Mr. Papa said that Microsoft's acquisition of Fast was a function of the target company's weakness.

"They were able to buy Fast because the company was trying to sell itself," he said, noting that Microsoft plans to mesh Fast with its SharePoint content management software, linking both products to Windows rather than the Linux operating system more widely used in search applications.

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