Verity boosts enterprise offering with desktop search

Verity has acquired the intellectual property assets of desktop-search specialist 80-20 Software, a privately-held software developer based in Australia.

The technology executes fast, accurate searching of e-mail folders and other local files, enabling users to access information stored on their personal systems from a single point. Specifically designed to meet enterprise requirements, it features deployment and control capabilities and is compliant with most security protocols.

The acquisition follows a growing number of requests from Verity customers for software that integrates with existing search mechanisms.

“Searching the desktop is a natural extension of enterprise search,” said Anthony Bettencourt, president and CEO at Verity. “The volume of e-mail and other unstructured data residing in individual PC hard drives is increasing at the same exponential rate as we are seeing with content in repositories and enterprise applications.”

The Verity-branded desktop search offering is expected to be available in the second half of 2005 and will be integrated with its Ultraseek and K2 Enterprise software – allowing users timely access to virtually all relevant content, regardless of its location within the organisation.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Verity will absorb 80-20’s desktop search engineering resources to ensure continued product development, while providing services to its existing customers.

In another development, Verity has announced a simplified pricing approach for its Ultraseek software, allowing organisations to download the solution and search up to 25,000 documents, free of charge, for a year. Any incremental document amounts can be purchased as business needs grow. In addition, any organisations that want to unify their search for an unlimited number of documents can obtain a four-year usage licence.

Customers will also benefit from capabilities previously priced as options, including the Ultraseek Content Classification Engine, XPA Java application programming interface and multi-lingual support.

For more information visit www.ultraseek.com.