Verity Inc has made its second acquisition in as many weeks with the purchase of 64k Inc, a small company founded by former IBM Corp database management researchers. The San Jose-based company’s main product is DBGuide, a product that searches across relational databases. Verity plans to release DBGuide under the Verity name by the first quarter of next year. It also plans to integrate the technology into its Search’97 platform. DBGuide cost Verity $3.5m in cash, and because 64k hasn’t released any product yet, Verity is able to write off almost the whole purchase price; it will take a $3.1m hit in its fourth quarter, the one ending May 31 this year for acquired in-process research and development. The 64k search engine can provide DBMS indexing, searching and clustering, and the company reckons its performance far outstrips that of standard SQL-based databases. It also allows for similarity searching to find fields that are similar but not exact marches of the target. The 64k group will operate as a new database applications group within Verity’s research and development organization. Verity’s core product, Search ’97 Information Server will have its field-search technology enhanced with the 64k engine, and later it will be used in its other main search products, Intelliserv and CD-Web Publisher. Verity is trying to differentiate its Search’97 family of products from Microsoft Corp’s Index Server, which is free. Last week Verity acquired the Keyview filtering technology from FTP Software Inc for $1.5m, and in January bought Cognisoft Corp for $10m for its Intelliserv so-called push technology. That combined product was due by now but has yet to surface.
