Yesterday, Oracle announced their intent to purchase Endeca, a vendor of unstructured data management and web commerce solutions.
The purchase aligns well with Oracles recent announcements relating to unstructured data integration. Specifically, the press release states:
“combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together.”
While significant sections of the Oracle announcement and the external discussion focuses on the technology integration aspects of the acquisition, I like the contributions by the Endeca solution(s) to Oracle’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) offerings more than the technological possibilities.
Customer Experience Management represents a challenging area for many customer-centric organizations or at least those claiming to be customer-centric. Bringing Endeca’s experience with ( and technology supporting ) CEM to the Oracle solution portfolio, enables Oracle to increase maturity of their offering as well as counter past strategic acquisitions by HP (2011) and Microsoft (2008) in this same space.