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Enterprise Search: End of One Chapter, Start of Another
A few weeks back Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for the Norwegian company Fast Search and Transfer. The deal hasn’t gone through yet, but it would be the sixth largest purchase ever for Microsoft. It’s a deal that Microsoft is hoping will make them a more credible player in the Enterprise Search market.
Enterprise Search is still fairly small market at $1.4 billion, and the large number of players make it a fairly fragmented market, led by Autonomy with 15% share, and followed by FAST with 9% and Google at 8.5%. FAST had been an earlier leader and was growing at a fast pace but ran into problems in 2007 and is expected to have a $150 million loss for 2007.
Coincident with Microsoft’s purchase of FAST was another announcement by a former FAST CEO, Ali Riaz. Riaz, who had led FAST for six years, is launching a new Search startup company valled Attivio. Riaz described the vision of Attivio as “Active Intelligence Engine,” a “universal repository for injecting information into key business processes, weaving data, content and applications together for a variety of uses such as ecommerce, eDiscovery, and operations business intelligence”. A search engine married with business intelligence.
An interesting idea. But can Attivio really differentiate itself from existing enterprise search companies?
