In the latest shuffle in enterprise search, SAS, known for business intelligence and analytics software, has announced today it acquired Teragram, natural language processing specialists. While it is tempting to see this as the confirmation of a trend of convergence in BI and enterprise search, that would be downplaying the ubiquitousness of the underlying components.

Enterprise search products are complex systems. So much so, in fact, that I would be hard pressed to point out any one vendor that has completely developed their solution from scratch, on their own. Key components are often licensed from specialists; for instance, most of the industry relies on either the INSO or the KeyView filters to convert various document types to text they can index. If you've ever wondered why the number of filetypes vendors claim to be able to process can be so strikingly similar across the board, that's why.

Of course, when the specialists are gobbled up by larger fish, this can lead to some interesting moves across the room. The KeyView filters, for instance, are now owned by Autonomy. Oracle Text, in a distant past, used the INSO filters, but the company switched and Secure Enterprise Search now makes use of Autonomy's KeyView filters. Stellent owned the INSO filters (which they acquired from eBT), and Oracle acquired Stellent; therefore the Stellent/INSO filters are now the Oracle filters, even though their flagship enterprise search product uses the competing components.

Confused? Who wouldn't be. So why bother trying to keep track of these embedded solutions? Well, if you're about to give up on your current implementation in despair or trying to make up your mind about the key differentiators between the vendors on your shortlist, it might help to know if you're actually about to decide between a Lotus Elise, an Opel Speedster or a Tesla Roadster. The big differences might not be where you expect them to be, and a good look under the hood may make all the difference.

By now you may wonder how Teragram's acquisition got you from musical chairs to car talk. Well, let the music start: SAS used to work with Inxight, Teragram's main competitor, while Teragram's technology has showed up in products from Fast Search & Transfer and Verity... And as the music stops, and all frantically grab their chair, suffice it to say: we're there, checking the engines... so you don't have to.