Customers looking to get more control over the ever-growing amounts of content and information in their enterprises will get help from Verity Inc. and Antarctica Systems Inc., which are delivering new search technology this month.
Verity later this month will release the first product coming from its acquisition of Inktomi Corp.s enterprise software business—a Federated Connector that links Veritys K2 search and knowledge management platform with Inktomis UltraSeek search software.
“K2 customers will be able to access content from the UltraSeek server in an instantaneous way,” said Anthony Bettencourt, Veritys president.
The next move to integrate Inktomi technology will likely happen by July, when Verity will integrate the Quiver workflow engine it acquired from Inktomi, said Bettencourt, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
“That will give our users an easier way to set up how documents are classified,” Bettencourt said.
Less clear is when Verity will make use of the XML Toolkit it got from Inktomi, in Foster City, Calif. Bettencourt said Verity might add that technology, which would allow for the searching of structured and unstructured data, within 12 months. But the marketplace is still not demanding it.
VERITY TAKING SHAPE Timeline for Verity to integrate technologies acquired from Inktomi
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Verity will have to be careful not to compete directly with Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp., which are planning to add XML extensions to their respective relational database technologies to combine structured and unstructured data repositories, Bettencourt said.
“We dont want to be in the gun sights of Oracle and Microsoft,” Bettencourt said. “We want to focus on knowledge-enabling CRM [customer relationship management] and other applications.”
Bettencourt said Verity added 43 Inktomi employees and 2,500 customers worth approximately $22 million a year. Verity will continue to support existing Inktomi products in addition to integrating them into Verity products.
Meanwhile, Antarctica shipped the latest version of its Visual Net visual search engine last week, promising users more control of how they view and navigate large information repositories.
Chief among the new features in Antarcticas Visual Net 3.0 is the integration of Macromedia Inc.s Flash Players at the interface level, which will give users more control over how and what information is displayed in the interface.
Users are able to configure the Visual Net interface using color, shape and size to bring the most important data to the surface of the content maps so they can spot trends in data faster, said Antarctica officials, in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Users can also filter by data field, for faster ad hoc querying, exploration and trend identification, officials said.