Enterprise IT spending may be down, but if the investment in new products by software vendors is any indication, the market for enterprise search remains strong.
Earlier this week, database activity monitoring specialist Imperva announced several upgrades to its core software and enterprise search giant Autonomy announced the completion of the acquisition of Web site search specialist Interwoven.
Today, Autonomy is announcing the integration of Autonomy’s core IDOL
software into Interwoven’s Team Site product. “With this acquisition we will redefine how global 2000 corporations interact with the Web and how leading law firms and government regulators will discover, analyze and manage information and interactions,” said Dr. Michael Lynch, group CEO of Autonomy, in a statement.
Autonomy specializes in handling “unstructured data” for enterprises — more or less, everything that’s not in a regular database, including Web sites, photos, and e-mails. IDOL promises to classify such data through a combination of automated scanning and pre-generated knowledge that the company calls automatic classification and taxonomy
generation.
The integration IDOL into Interwoven’s Team Site expands the collection of data, allowing companies to track intranets, extranets, and even what’s being said about a company on Web sites. “This unique platform can automate many currently manual aspects of operating Web content management and marketing optimization, as well as allow full
conceptual customer profiling combining all modes of customer interaction,
from e-mail, phone, messaging and Web sites,” said Anthony Bettencourt, CEO of
Autonomy Interwoven, in a statement.
Seth Rosenblatt, vice president of marketing for Autonomy Interwoven and Nicole Eagan, Autonomy’s chief marketing officer, said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com that a key differentiator of Team Site is its technology and solutions for multivariable testing, which Interwoven acquired in the 2007 purchase of Optimost. They said Team Site would be adopted most rapidly in highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance, and legal.
Autonomy also said that it will release a new series of modules in the coming months.
Meeting compliance requirements
Other vendors have more specific goals. For those vendors touting compliance, the goal is to enable enterprises to clearly separate audit tasks from database administration.
“Compliance is the magic word,” said Mark Kraynak, vice president of
marketing for Imperva. “Many of our customers have 50 or 100 or 200
databases. Our promise is that you can forward all the audit information to
one place. Many companies have nothing in place today that can do that.”
Kraynak said history shows that the internal threats that compliance systems are built to manage are real. He pointed to the Enron scandal and to Societe Generale. “At Societe Generale, the trader was able to manipulate the application that managed his daily trading limits because he used to work on the team that managed that application,” he said.
“At Enron, you had a CXO calling the DBA at 2 AM telling them to change entries in the general ledger. That’s why regulators now care about privileged users and what they access,” Kraynak added.
“Regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and Basel II are all driving the need for advanced database controls, audit mechanisms, and forensic analysis tools to tighten security over databases and transactional systems,” Imperva said in a statement.
Update adds comments from Autonomy and Interwoven and clarifies that IDOL will be integrated into Team Site.
