For some years now the enterprise search market has been sick and in search of relief. In frankly a shocking development, Autonomy announced today it was acquiring the veritable Verity search company for $500 million. See this Bloomberg story ….
This acquisition amount is itself a signal of how poorly this market has been going. Enterprise search has averaged about $500 million annually in revenues over the past few years with little or slow growth. Autonomy has been the small cousin from England, but has now gobbled up the old dinosaur in Verity.
BTW, if someone mentions synergies or complementarity to you about this acquistion, don’t believe it. This is totally an indication of how poor the entire enterprise search market has become. With unstructured data representing 60-80% of all data available to an enterprise, these valuations are indicatiive of how piss-poor the enterprise document technology is as present.
Bon voyage! I expect all of these dinosaurs to find their final resting place in the sun. RIP
