Friday, July 1, 2011

Endeca says IPO is likely in its future

By Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal

Twelve years after its founding, Cambridge-based Endeca Inc. has established itself as a search engine technology leader, reporting more than $150 million in annual revenue and customers such as Walmart, IBM and Toyota.

Endeca CEO Steve Papa says data trends make him confident that considerable growth is still ahead for the company, known in the IT world as the inventor of “guided navigation” search.

And there’s something else he’s sure about: Endeca is IPO-bound.

“We have the infrastructure in place to register to be a public company,” Papa said in an interview this week. “We’re continuing to invest heavily in building a substantial business. And at the appropriate time, we’ll join the ranks of publicly traded companies.”

Papa declined to discuss the timing for either the registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or the IPO in an article in the Boston Business Journal. But he noted that the company has its reporting, business processes and compliance requirements ready for the SEC filing.

Endeca’s business is expanding fast — with revenue up by 30 percent in 2010 — and is also “very profitable,” in spite of the robust technology investments the company has been making, Papa said. He declined to give specifics on the company’s profitability.

Endeca is not a candidate for being acquired, Papa said, because there’s so much room for expansion at the company. “We think we’re still in the early stages of two very large markets,” he said, referring to the company’s two business lines — search engines for commercial websites (InFront) and search/analytics tools for internal business intelligence (Latitude).

Read the complete story on the Boston Business Journal website.