Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Sybase acquires ISDD and Avaki
It is sometimes the smaller events that prove to be the most significant. Monday's announcement by Sybase of its plans to acquire two tiny firms, ISDD and Avaki could be one of those events. Comment: ISDD is a firm that Ovum has written about before, a clear acquisition target in a cluttered market with insufficient market share to make it alone. But one with an excellent technology offering. It provides a concept-based search facility, which uses a Bayesian inference engine. It supports indexing of both structured and unstructured data sources, providing features such as natural language querying, 'find similar' searches, automatic summarisation of results, relevance ranking and search term highlighting. Users can also set up personalised agents that search content based on a stated interest or profile, and a categorisation module allows content to be classified according to a rules-based taxonomy.ISDD has attempted to sell into the mid market, and had some limited success in the UK. But this 'Autonomy-like' product fits beautifully into a different market: 'The unwired enterprise' that Sybase and its iAnywhere division has so successfully defined. Sybase needs to continue to differentiate itself away from the database giants and have done a good job to date with the mobility message. But unstructured data issue also needs to be addressed, simply to stop further erosion of their core database client base to the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. The acquisition provides a response of sorts to Oracle's move into unstructured data management. (Oracle has announced Oracle Content Services 10g providing highly scalable and relatively full-blown enterprise content and document management capabilities). ISDD does not provide ECM (enterprise content management) capabilities but it does fix a gap of sorts and allows unstructured data to be found, accessed and controlled centrally. The Avaki acquisition in turns adds depth to this differentiation strategy.Avaki positions itself as an EII (enterprise information integration) solution that provides views of multiple data sources and federated access to those sources. In other words, a single view of the customer data regardless of how complex and disparate those sources may be.Sybase recognises that not all data will be stored in a Sybase database, and that databases themselves are becoming commoditised, and that the key opportunity is to manage data effectively regardless of where it resides. Both of these acquisitions provide foundations to build out a more coherent and focused offering for the company, and one that is clearly differentiated from Sybase's (much larger) competitors.
