(SYS-CON Media) - Endeca Technologies, enterprise information access software company, announced greater than 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth for the company’s Media & Publishing business in 2006, as media and publishing companies continued the rapid adoption of information access technology over simple search engine software from legacy enterprise search vendors and Web search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Leading classifieds sites, news outlets, and premium content providers like ACP Media Limited (carpoint.com.au, autotrader.co.nz), Cox Newspapers, Dice.com, Discovery Communications, EBSCO, Emap, Lonely Planet, PennySaverUSA (Harte-Hanks), Trader Media Group (autotrader.co.uk), William Reed, and Yellow Pages Singapore headlined dozens of key wins and innovative deployments.

“The past year represented a significant milestone for the role of next-generation information access in online media environments and Endeca’s media and publishing business, which accounted for 20 percent of our overall new software business in 2006,” said Steve Papa, chief executive officer of Endeca. “Many media and publishing companies first approach us looking to tap the search capabilities of our platform, typically as part of an effort to improve their user experience. Once they realize that search is just one of many capabilities required for powerful information access – and the clear business benefits information access makes possible – the Endeca value proposition becomes the clear winner.”

Classifieds sites, news outlets, and premium content providers are facing increased competition from news aggregators, Web search engines and a variety of alternative information sources like blogs, citizen journalism, and other new, nimble challengers. Staying competitive and increasing revenues, whether through subscriptions, advertising, or cross-medium brand loyalty, now requires not only attractive content but a rich, compelling user experience to match. But creating, enhancing and maintaining such an experience is costly and requires significant resources.

The Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) gives media and publishing companies the latest information access features and capabilities to help their consumers explore and find personally relevant content and promotions. It offers both site developers and non-technical workers the tools needed to manage the user experience and deliver contextually related content and promotions. In addition, the Endeca IAP helps media and publishing companies unlock additional value from other critical applications and infrastructure, including the most popular content management systems, Web analytics solutions, and ad server platforms.

New capabilities introduced in the Endeca IAP 5.0 release, combined with the platform’s unique adaptive data model, make it easy to incorporate a variety of rich, Web 2.0 features into the user experience, including tag clouds, RSS feeds, user generated content and other rich internet application features like AJAX, to allow applications to be updated quickly and incrementally, without reloading the entire browser page. All of these capabilities are designed to handle high volume traffic and offer access to extremely large collections of disparate content and data sources, ensuring a compelling, interactive user experience. As a result, media and publishing companies can attract and retain customers, boost content consumption and increase revenue, while reducing the demands on development and IT resources.