Regular readers of this blog know that Surfray's MondoSearch and Ontolica (search for SharePoint) products have a bit of a checkered past. First vendor MondoSoft went bankrupt; it was then sold to SurfRay; then SurfRay went bankrupt; then it was restructured to SurfRay 2009. But I'm happy to report that the Danish company now seems to be doing a lot better.

It's now owned by a Danish venture capital outfit called Vækstfonden (a "government backed investment fund") with Vækstfonden's Søren Pallesen as CEO. And even though the company went through several rough patches, it seems the revenue stream for its software remained  solid enough; the company claims its U.S. subsidiary kept turning profits throughout.

While that is promising for future stability, the vendor has remained relatively quiet on other fronts. Unsurprisingly, for some time no new products were coming out.

But it seems that, too, is changing: in the past few months new minor versions of MondoSearch and Ontolica were announced. MondoSearch is still going to need a lot of work before it'll be up to par with modern offerings, but Ontolica is still a pretty good alternative to SharePoint 2007's rather basic search functionality. It now also includes search analytics (previously a separate product), something which alone might merit a license -- assuming you have sufficient resources to analyze and act upon the potential goldmine of search metrics.

As a company, SurfRay is now expanding beyond the Danish borders. Though it has always maintained a presence in the U.S. (and had a booth at last year's SharePoint conference), we'll now see an office here in The Netherlands, as well.

However, the elephant in Ontolica's room, of course, is SharePoint 2010. Microsoft has finally addressed one of the oddest deficiencies: the lack of wildcard search. That's always been one of the things Ontolica marketing pivoted on (for a while, you could get the free "Ontolica wildcard search add-on" as a teaser preview for the complete product.) So how's SurfRay going to keep competitive, in between SharePoint 2010 and FAST for SharePoint 2010? Well, Ontolica 2010 has already been announced, and it offers many of the modern search interface features that SharePoint lacks, without adding all of the complexity of a FAST server.

While we'll have to see whether Ontolica 2010 will deliver on its promises, SurfRay is certainly positioning the product in exactly the gap Microsoft's coming line-up is leaving. We'll be keeping tabs on how that works out, and sharing our findings with our Search & Information Access subscribers.