Big news out of Boston and the Bay Area today. Oracle, the Silicon Valley database and business software giant, said it has agreed to acquire Endeca Technologies, the Cambridge, MA-based enterprise search and e-commerce tech company. Terms have not been announced, but the deal is expected to close before the end of the year.
Endeca started in 1999, led by Steve Papa and Peter Bell, and has been an icon of the Boston-area tech scene for the past decade. Its investors have included Bessemer Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Ampersand Ventures, Intel Capital, DN Capital, and SAP Ventures. As of early last year, the company had raised about $75 million in venture capital. No word yet on any restructuring or employee moves.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Endeca would get scooped up by a West Coast giant, given that many Silicon Valley firms have been interested in the company for years. But it’s yet another Boston-built tech company that’s giving up local control (see ATG, Novell, ITA, Quattro, Where, Vertica…), if not heading West outright.
Redwood Shores, CA-based Oracle (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ORCL]]), for its part, says that together with Endeca it plans to “create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.” The press release singles out Endeca’s InFront Web commerce and Latitude software products as being especially important to integrate with Oracle’s existing packages.
