Archive for September, 2011

Oracle Eying Endeca? (Oct 18th Update: Oracle Acquires Endeca)

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Oracle Larry Ellison has been attacking the rationale of HP buying Autonomy for $10B.  One wonders if he wasn’t eyeing Autonomy himself for an acquisition before HP snagged it.  This said, now that Fast, Convera, Autonomy, Netrics, have all been acquired, we are wondering if Endeca might not be the next one up for an Oracle acquisition this time?

See more here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hp-autonomy-2011-9

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-fuels-fire-over-h-ps-autonomy-deal-2011-09-29

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-29/tech/30216980_1_oracle-qatalyst-slides

==== 10/18/2011 – Update ====

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/18/oracle-buys-endeca-targeting-unstructured-data/ That’s it.  Oracle announces they are buying Endeca.  This is big news.  Another confirmation for us that Search is a hot category for enterprise software but also that deeper integration of search is in the works.  While this acquisition of may be a good thing for those Endeca users with full-text and unstructured  data applications, other with massive structured data (ecommerce, CRM, etc.) will need to turn to other solution providers possibly.  We are ready and waiting.

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Posted in Exorbyte, Software | No Comments »

Marc Andreessen Wants Oracle Dead

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Exorbyte doesn’t care but the feud between Oracle and the “cloud bunch” (Andreessen, Benioff of Salesfoce.com, and more) but we feel it has something else to teach us besides the low blows.

“Andreessen kicked off BoxWorks, the first-ever customer conference for cloud collaboration provider Box.net, this morning in San Francisco.

His firm invested in Box, he says, partly because he found that a lot of the other startups they were funding already used Box’s product.

As he put it, “Ten years ago, it was a joke: you’d raise $20 million in venture capital and write a $4 or $5 million check to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC….When it started, Salesforce looked like a toy compared with Siebel. Look ahead five years later, it’s obviously better. Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle.”

Read more: Marc Andreessen: The “Clock Is Ticking” On Oracle - http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9#comment-4e84d76aecad04784000002d#ixzz1ZNOjydsW

Oracle is indeed under siege big time. But this cloud computing debacle is just one more front for them to fight on. SAP, their main rival in the DB business, has been taking effective swings at them regarding the lack of believe they have in in-memory databases (which are by-the-way the way forward for cloud computing also). Hasso Plattner from SAP has a field day here with this:

Our company sells SaaS site search for ecommerce and we also did away with Oracle from the start. Better yet, the vast majority of our customers are the same and this is a growing market!

Good luck Larry!

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Posted in Exorbyte, Technology, databases | 5 Comments »

Autonomy’s Secrets Revealed

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Wow, after the Microsoft / Fast $1 Billion debacle , we now have the Autonomy / HP / Oracle $10 Billion version of the same type of debates over company valuation when HP acquired Autonomy last month.  Sitting on the sidelines happily we get splattered with great intelligence on the reality of Autonomy’s claims of shareholder value.  Enjoy and send your comments!

BUSTED: Oracle Publishes Slide Deck To Prove Autonomy CEO Is Lying
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hp-autonomy-2011-9#ixzz1ZNOVjCVb

9/29/2011 – 2:16PM  - I will just add that no matter what Autonomy and HP say to justify that acquisition, I just can’t see it why they ended up above $10B, especially after looking at these slides.  Good luck.

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Posted in Business, Exorbyte, Industries, Search, Software, databases | No Comments »

Conversions Bragging Rights

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Exorbyte just released some news from our customers which makes us quite proud.  Conversion increases of up to 45%.  That’s impressive by any count.  Conversion rates are the ratio of buyers to visitors to an online store.  Typically retailers with 10% are pretty happy.  Even 5% is acceptable, which would mean that 1 in 20 visitors to a store leaves a buyer.  In such a case, a retailer experiencing a 10% increase would see its conversion rate go up to 14.5% after some improvements, such as implementing Exorbyte Commerce.

Now, the question remains, how could Exorbyte Commerce generate such an improvement in conversion rates?  Rather than listing our product features which you can view on our site, let’s answer this question from the retailer’s point-of-view.  The table below lists a number of features which retailers are advised to pay particular attention to when engaging in Conversions Rate Optimization (CRO).  For each of these CRO tactics, Exorbyte Commerce provides an innovative solution.

CRO TACTICS DESCRIPTION HOW DOES EXORBYTE COMMERCE RESPONDS?
Identify and Pursue Lost Opportunities Do you know why your visitors leave without buying?  Making conjectures about why visitors leave without buying doesn’t help you.  In the real world store owners talk to their clerks, cashiers, and sales staff to find out what sells and what doesn’t. Exorbyte Commerce introduces actionable reports about what users search for, what they find, what they don’t find.  Retailers can finally find out what people are searching for and not finding.  There are many easily identifiable lost opportunities for which Exorbyte Commerce Ranking and Alias rules can become an immediate answer.  No need for experts and guesswork anymore.
Catch Visitors Before Flight Countless online store surveys show how short the attention span of visitors is. In a matter of seconds retailers have a chance to catch a visitor’s attention or never to see a transaction from them. The Exorbyte Commerce Autocomplete which features product pictures, prices, categories, and other relevant data based on the first couple of characters typed will instantly catch users attention. Do not doubt the search box is the place to catch a user’s attention.  This is the moment of truth for online retail.
Make Your Products Visible Online stores can easily feature hundreds of thousands of products.  They have no floor space limitations like in the brick-and-mortar world. How do you make sure your products are found when you carry thousands of them. Exorbyte Commerce always gets users to the product of their choice because its proprietary search engine is far better at decreasing the number of fruitless searches and at ranking relevant search results than any other search engine in the market.
Define and Improve Landing Pages Landing pages are pages that feature products, promos, marketing programs that may have a stronger visitor appeal than single product pages, pages about store’s policies or the store’s transcriptional process. Landing pages could be about seasonal promotions, an exclusive brand that the store carries, etc. They get picked up easily by web search engines but they don’t show in the store’s search results. With Target Pages Exorbyte Commerce allows online retailers to add new landing pages anytime they want. They can be associated with keywords of their choice and will be featured in the site search results when a user’s query seems relevant.
Increase Page Load Speed Slow stores do not fare well with online visitors. They expect fast page loading times. That’s a known fact. However, it is challenging to balance this requirement with that of featuring rich content like lengthy descriptions, suggestions, large images, etc. Exorbyte Commerce is an AJAX-based application. It means that interacting with the Exorbyte Commerce interface users won’t wait for pages to re-load.  The page’s contents change on-the-fly in a fraction of a second and there is never a delay. Rather than frustrated and impatient, users are surprised and in awe at the speed and quality of their experience.
Reduce Clutter and Messy Interfaces Messy pages, clutter, and too many choices almost guarantees visitor flight. Beyond a certain point, information overload pushes visitors to leave so they can breathe the fresh air of a lighter store design somewhere else. Exorbyte Commerce’s interface is light and well organized. It is the fruit of years of experience with online retail. We have reduced the presence of buttons, images, text, and other elements to an elegant set of well recognizable tools which visitors will feel are natural and relevant.
Make the Process Simple and Natural Don’t re-invent the wheel. Users don’t expect your store to redefine the process of finding and buying products on the web. They want a simple and natural experience that feels familiar. Unfamiliarity breeds risk and uncertainty in the minds of consumers. Buyers like control and a risk-less environment to make their purchases. Exorbyte Commerce follows the principles of good user interface design with simple, yet fast and sophisticated tools that will feel all but new to visitors. We take the best of what we have learned with some of the largest online retailers we have done work for and bring it to your store.
Use Images Whenever Possible Nothing replaces a good quality image in terms of removing the uncertainty that comes with buying a product off a strange new store. Seeing is believing. Exorbyte Commerce automatically pulls images from your store catalog and features them in search and suggestions.

Tell us what you do to improve conversions and how much quality search factors into your conversion maximization efforts.

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Posted in Exorbyte, Merchandising, Technology, Usability, eCommerce | No Comments »

The Point of Search : Moment of Truth for Online Retail

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Exorbyte Commerce has been released for about a year now (Aug 2010).  It was initially very focused on providing best-in-class site search for online retailers and nothing else. Years of serving some of the biggest names in online retail in both Europe and the USA (Yahoo!, Vodafone, Billiger, and more) have led Exorbyte to develop a unique expertise at the crossroads between search engine software and online retail merchandising software. Exorbyte Commerce was also founded on Exorbyte’s award-winning proprietary structured data search engine: MatchMaker.

Since Exorbyte Commerce customers started flocking to the online service in 2010, many have requested various merchandising features to integrate their merchandising strategies into the search experience of their visitors.  Recently, Exorbyte has responded with a series of powerful merchandising features that prefigure an online retail industry where the principal moment of truth in turning a visitor into a buyer is at “the point of search” (as opposed to the “point of sale”): advanced search reporting, ranking rules, aliases, target pages, etc.

The Point of Search, is it really the moment of truth on your store when it comes to new visitors?  How do you assess this?  Do you track exit pages?  Do you know many bounces come from your search pages or home page?

Posted in Exorbyte, Merchandising, Usability, eCommerce | 3 Comments »