Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g: A concern for best-of-breed search vendors?

Yesterday, Oracle unveiled a new standalone enterprise search product: Secure Enterprise Search 10g.

From the official documentation:

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, a standalone product from Oracle, enables a secure, high quality, easy-to-use search across all enterprise information assets. Key features include:

• The ability to search and locate public, private and shared content across Intranet web-servers, databases, files on local disk or on file-servers, IMAP email, document management systems, applications, and portals
• Highly secure crawling, indexing, and searching
• A simple, intuitive search interface leading to an excellent user-experience
• Excellent search quality, with the most relevant items for a query shown first, even when the query spans diverse public or private data sources
• Analytics on search results and understanding of usage patterns
• Sub-second query performance
• Ease of administration and maintenance leveraging your existing IT expertise

While the product isn't something that's likely to move the needle for Oracle, it does represent another thorn in the side of the standalone enterprise search companies; most notably Autonomy, FAST & Endeca.

A few months ago, Autonomy merged with long-time rival Verity in order to foster scale to help fend off the juggernauts increasing presence. FAST, the darling of the sector, continues to flourish with a best-in-class technology suite but openly acknowledges the threat Oracle, IBM, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft pose collectively.

One of the interesting subplots of the enterprise search market is the disparate technology approaches that go into indexing and retrieval of structured data versus unstructured content. Oracle's product is clearly focused on structured content [a hallmark of being the world's dominant database vendor] whereas Google, Yahoo! and the standalone vendors have more compelling offerings in unstructured environments.

Conventional wisdom questions how FAST, Autonomy and Endeca can stay afloat with not one, but five of the world's technology juggernauts laser-focused on the market. Yet, all three are alive and well, particularly FAST. Last quarter, FAST grew revenues 52% while generating record margins. How much longer can FAST keep it up? And will one of the "big five" finally decide "if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em?" Only time will tell.

Related Articles:

• Autonomy+Verity = Still Searching
• FAST's Torbjorn Kanestrom interviewed in Red Herring
• Oracle Challenges Google in Enterprise Search [InformationWeek]

Note: At the time of this writing I, and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over, maintained long equity positions in ORCL & MSFT, but did not maintain positions [long or short] in GOOG, IBM, YHOO, AUTNY or FAST. Our fund is an investor in Granite Global Ventures, which is a venture-backer of Endeca.

search enterprise search oracle autonomy FAST verity endeca software microsoft google yahoo woodrow unstructured structured