CSIRO sells Funnelback search company to Squiz

Stuart Corner
Friday, 03 July 2009 11:02

IT Industry - Strategy

CSIRO has sold its Funnelback search engine technology company to Australian content management company Squiz. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Squiz is the developer of he MySource Matrix, an open source content management system used by governments, universities and corporations. It claims to be "one of the world's largest privately owned content management companies with offices throughout Australia, the UK and, later this year, New Zealand, Europe and the US.

The Funnelback search engine originated as a research project in 1998, originally under the name of P@noptic, by information retrieval expert Dr David Hawking in a joint venture between the CSIRO ICT Centre and the Australian National University. Even as a non-commercial research project a demand developed for the search engine and it was installed in a number of large Australian corporations.

Former chairman of Funnelback, Stephen Kirkby, said the sale would give Australia a strong globally competitive IT company. "The merging of these two successful Australian IT companies bodes well for their clients and future prospects as they will have access to best of breed technology and staff. Funnelback with its strong scientific CSIRO-based intellectual property (IP) foundation, combined with Squiz's commitment to best of breed service on the open source platform, gives Australia a strong globally competitive IT company."

Funnelback was formed in early 2006 to commercialise the technology and early 2007 it filed patents for its clustering engine, Fluster.

Funnelback's flagship product, Funnelback Enterprise, is billed "an integrated, industrial strength search solution that searches content assets across Internet, intranet, database and shared network drives, as well as electronic document management and portal systems."

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