The following e-mail was addressed to ITWeb and iStrategy editors, and CCed to Stephan Pretorius of Oracle Online.
ITWeb wishes to point out that I-Net Bridge and Ananzi declined to comment when asked to do so for the original story.
Subject: The real truth about Oracle and Ananzi, from Mike Renzon, sales and marketing director of I-Net Bridge:
"The facts are as follows:
I-Net Bridge was invited to a lunch with Stephan and his manager (Peter McKenzie).
At the lunch Stephan and Peter proposed that the I-Net Bridge sales team and the Oracle sales team join forces in capturing the lion`s share of the online advertising industry.
Neil Jacobsohn and myself had discussed Oracle`s future on selling on our products and had attended this lunch with the clear message that I-Net Bridge would be taking all its advertising sales in-house and would stop using Oracle as an extended sales force with immediate effect.
Our reasons for this are as follows:
Oracle`s performance in selling on Ananzi was reasonable, but far from spectacular, and they fell far short of warranted targets for the first six months of selling.
Our own I-Net Bridge sales team has made significant in-roads into the market with the largest SA network of sites targeting the business market (Business Day, netAssets, Business Times, Financial Mail, and several other publications targeting the business market).
Our sales team had their best month ever in February and our success over the last two months shows a definite turning in online ad-spend, and a preference for niched content sites as well as an acceptance of I-Net Bridge as an established player in online media sales.
Having two sales teams in the market was causing confusion.
Over the last eight months we have positioned ourselves very well in the advertising agencies and with the key online media spenders.
As Stephan points out: The I-Net Bridge network of sites offers exactly the target market that the big spenders are looking for - thanks Steph! We agree!
Oracle`s sales team will most certainly go through a difficult period with the departure of their management team (Stephen and Lynn) and two of their most experienced sales people all in the period of two to three months. After the lunch I could see that merging the success of the I-Net Bridge sales team into the ailing Oracle team was obviously an attractive quick fix for Oracle.
The product Ananzi has absolutely nothing to do with this business arrangement. It was a sales decision made by I-Net Bridge management to cease using Oracle`s services.
If Oracle had bothered to enquire into the technology behind Ananzi they would have found that:
At its heart is probably the most robust, well architected, low maintenance code ever written for the South African Internet.
Ananzi`s core was redeveloped from scratch in a six-month project using the most senior developers at The Internet Solution. This project was completed approximately 18 months ago.
Ananzi can easily be extended to use natural language queries and I-Net Bridge is already using Autonomy for this purpose in its BIS service.
Autonomy can easily be integrated into Ananzi`s core to offer natural language searches, but this has not been our focus to-date as the number of SA Web sites is easily searched using boolean searches.
Ananzi`s focus has been on searching and indexing, and to-date several independent searching facilities (including market leaders like Brabys) have been incorporated into Ananzi.
Future plans for Ananzi will ensure that it retains its position as the country`s leading search engine and directory service.
The employee who left Ananzi to work on Max was not on the original Ananzi development team, as reported by Stephan. He is a systems administrator with little architectural, development background, or database administration skills.
I urge you to publish the truth in the next issues of your publication."
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