Yesterday Oracle announced the acquisition of enterprise search company Endeca. Apart from amplifying what Wikibon’s Dave Vellante calls “urinary olympics” between Oracle and HP (which you’ll recall just acquired the enterprise search company Autonomy, with much derision from Oracle), what does Oracle get out of the deal?

A few things, possibly. Database expert Doug Monash says that Oracle’s official statement on the Endeca acquisition isn’t really inline with what Endeca’s technology does. Monash describes Endeca as being powered by a columnar database with flexible schemas – one data set within the database can have a very different structure from another. He says Oracle’s own columnar products have been disappointing and that Endeca could help fill this gap, along with provide a solution for these sorts of mixed schema environments – something NoSQL databases have been doing for a while now.

Forrester’s Leslie Owens points out that Endeca’s technology is a good fit for both e-commerce and agile business intelligence. The agile BI part fits well with Monash’s analysis of Endeca’s columnar abilities, and helps Oracle compete with HP’s Vertica, SAP HANA and others.

Meanwhile, Oracle has been building out its e-commerce solutions with acquisitions of FatWire and ATG. Integrating Endeca’s search capabilities will help Oracle compete with Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Platform and IBM’s Sterling Commerce.

Services Angle

The enterprise search market has been shrinking in recent years, so it’s no surprise to see companies like Endeca and Autonomy selling to larger companies. In a research piece at Wikibon last year, Gary MacFadden worte that “By 2012, unified search platforms that combine both Enterprise and Internet search capabilities along with offering some traditional BI and analytics functionality will be widely adopted by knowledge workers seeking flexibility to tune information access solutions for diverse workloads across a variety of content sources and data types.” I see enterprise search consolidation with traditional enterprise software vendors like Oracle, IBM and SAP as a step in that direction. For more, you can read MacFadden’s piece here.