Endeca has made a name for itself in “guided navigation” search (well, not a household name — it was recently called, “one of the larger software companies in Boston that no one has ever really heard about”). It serves online retailers by helping them make their products more findable, including Wal-Mart, Target, Tesco, Home Depot, and 38 of the other top 100 according to a recent news story.

Founders Steve Papa and Peter Bell, however, told the Boston Globe that they see the future of the company in helping their client companies make sense of all of the information the company has merged with all that can be found on the Internet. In short, they are diving into business intelligence and analytics. They aren’t the only ones in the market: Attivio is in the space and Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer in 2008 for a cool $1.2 billion.

“With more information in our lives, we need new ways to look at it,” Papa told the Globe. He says that Endeca’s software can “present data about sales or supply chains or new product development as charts, graphs, and tag clouds.”

Of course those of us in analytics are well aware of many powerful tools for making sense of data. What is interesting here is the company’s approach to merging the creation of data through search, integrating that information into a larger data set, and providing tools for analyzing it. They make it easier for both consumers and clients to create value through the use of different views into the data.

Google, of course, does variations on this although Endeca is a traditionally structured enterprise application rather than something that lives in the cloud, and Google’s search algorithms aren’t customized by the companies on which they search.

What do you think? Is it inevitable that search — perhaps the ultimate channel for generating data about consumer interests and preferences — come together with business intelligence and analytics tools? Or will focused players like SAS and others always have an advantage in providing the applications crunch the data and present in ways that foster better, more agile decision making? Do companies that try to do both risk diluting their ability to be the best at either side of the equation?

Let us hear from you!