What is the future of site search for ecommerce: Part 2

In the last two years there have been a series of mergers and acquisitions that have completely changed the landscape of search vendors.  This only goes to re-enforce the point I made previously that search in retail is commoditized and reached a level at which innovation in functionality is left to smaller iterative improvements, and the future for search is to not as a stand alone service but as an integral component of a larger vision for ecommerce. 

But how have all these Acquisitions played out and what can we expect from retail search in the future?

• Fast was the first to be acquired by Microsoft back in 2008 and since then there has seemed little focus on retail and more focus on SharePoint integration.
• Mercado was acquired by Ominture which made sense in the pursuit of closing the loop for personalization and merchandising.  However, Omniture was recently acquired by Adobe and my discussions with Omniture now leave me unclear to what their actual roadmap and strategy is.  It seems that the Ominiture product set will remain as a suite of loosely coupled products (e.g. Mercado, sitecatalyst). Adobe has it all the components necessary to create an extremely interesting story for retailers around personalization, merchandising and search.  However, at the moment this story is left to the imagination of retailers and system integrators.  What is needed is a clear strategy and roadmap for all their commerce related products such as Mercado, Omniture and Scene 7.
• Fred Hopper’s price point and licensing model has enabled it to gain a lot of traction in the SME commerce market, however, it was also acquired very recently by SDL who also own the Tridion CMS. SDL PR and marketing are boasting that the acquisition of Fred Hopper adds targeting and marketing to their portfolio with SDL releasing a Fred Hopper and Tridion integration called SmartTarget in Q2 this year.  This acquisition may allow SDL to sell Fred Hopper into other markets and enable SDL to enter the ecommerce and retail market, but whether the combination of Tridion and Fred Hopper will provide any additional value to retailers or whether there will be any new innovations remains to be seen.
• Autonomy, which is rarely considered for retail search also acquired the Interwoven CMS.  This fits well with its overall strengths in unstructured content and I have seen no further indication that they will focus any further attention to commerce and retail.
• Endeca is now the last man standing in terms of big pure play search.  Endeca competitors seem to be suffering from a loss of focus and pace which is usual following any M&A activity.  This along with recent developments including page builder and the SEM modules has placed it above its competitors in commerce and retail search.  Their recent strategic alliance with the Hybris who provides an eCommerce and Product Information Management (PIM) platform show that Edenca continues to invest in commerce and retail.   The interesting thing about the strategic alliance is that it is not just about marketing, in fact Endeca and Hybris have created a joint development team working at integrating the two platforms.  If done right this could bring some exciting new developments across all search and eCommerce functionality.  It will also be interesting to see how they deal with the usual clash over which system will control the front-end and user experience.