Imagine this scenario: a sales person at a paper
manufacturer needs to access a variety of information to ensure
that they will meet an ambitious target for the current
quarter.
Some of that information is external, some of it resides in the
company’s databases, and some of it is on file systems scattered
around the organisation. Instead of logging into several different
systems to retrieve the information, they access just one:
www.google.com.
By clicking “include secure content” on the familiar browser
interface, which sits alongside the usual images, groups and news
categories above the Google search box, the executive can retrieve
that information straight away.
By typing a prospect’s name into the search box, for example,
the Google interface provides them with information direct from the
company’s Siebel customer relationship management system. That
includes contact details and lists recent communications with that
prospect. They do not even need to spell the name correctly.
By typing in “sales in the South West”, Google brings back a
real-time sales figures graphic from the company’s Cognos business
intelligence system. The sales executive does not need to know the
exact name of the report and the graphic appears directly in the
browser interface, so there is no need to click on a link to view
it. A search under “South West sales” would deliver exactly the
same authoritative and accurate result.
By typing in a purchase order number, Google recognises the
number and retrieves the appropriate records from the company’s
Oracle financials system, as well as finding and retrieving a
document from a file server and a contact name from an Outlook
contact list. “Google is not just for web searchers any more,” says
Jim Murphy, an analyst at AMR Research. “It increasingly becomes
the human interface for enterprise information.”
Rather than a last resort when a user cannot navigate to what
they are looking for, he says, Google becomes the starting point
for enterprise information access and retrieval.
With that goal in mind, Google released version 4.6 of the
Google Search Appliance in April 2006, which incorporates its
Onebox for enterprise architecture.
The Google Search Appliance is two years old, but this latest
announcement represents a step forward in its enterprise
capabilities. Although Google Search Appliance already enabled
companies to add search to their enterprise networks for structured
and unstructured information, Onebox extends that search to
dynamic, real-time data held in enterprise applications, financial
records and business intelligence repositories through a single
search request.
This requires close partnerships with enterprise systems
suppliers, and Google is relying heavily on such support to develop
modules that will allow its products to interact with Onebox. To
date, Google has lined up about 60 partners and systems integration
companies to do so.
“With eager software suppliers clamouring for attention, Google
has the luxury to choose the best fits, the complements that meet
common demands,” says Murphy. These partners will build and offer
connectors that allow access to information stored in their
systems, as well as provide business logic that goes some way
toward interpreting user queries and determining relevancy.
One such area is business intelligence. “Cognos and SAS
Institute have both developed demonstrable integrations with
Google,” says Murphy. Another is CRM. “Many CRM systems have
failed, or at least struggled severely, for lack of accessibility
and usability for a wide range of workers,” he says.
Google has already announced partnerships with
software-as-a-service suppliers NetSuite and Salesforce.com. Other
Google Onebox partners include Oracle and networking firm Cisco,
which plans to open up its Meetingplace conferencing system to the
Google Onebox interface.
Analysts have largely praised Google’s strategy for the Onebox
architecture. “If you provide applications or data that enterprise
personnel may need to search, evaluate Google’s API programme
immediately,” says Whit Andrews, research vice-president at analyst
firm Gartner.
But, he warns, companies that take this advice should carefully
examine the depth and sophistication of the connectors that
Google’s partner suppliers build. “Do not simply assume that a
connection is deep and productive,” he says.
However, the ability to search across multiple data types is
nothing new to most companies: they have been able to buy it for
years from enterprise search suppliers such as Fast Search and
Transfer and Autonomy.
For that reason, the incumbents in enterprise search will not be
driven away. High-end systems that cost hundreds of thousands of
pounds but which are engineered to produce more relevant results
across a wider range of sources are likely to continue to be the
choice for large enterprises with specific business needs.
In some cases, these are more sophisticated at categorisation:
sorting keyword searches by concept and context. Others surpass
Google in text mining, or deriving meaning from unstructured data.
These companies and their systems integration partners have been
working for years with large enterprises to build taxonomies
specific to their own requirements and the information they hold
and need to search for.
In February 2006, for example, Fast signed a contract with legal
and professional publishing company LexisNexis, which will see Fast
reselling and integrating its Enterprise Search Platform with
LexisNexis’s existing human-built taxonomies. The plug-in
application will be integrated with 24 industry-specific
taxonomies, as well as daily general business and news updates.
Rather than rely on third parties to provide business logic that
goes some way toward interpreting user queries, as Google does,
companies such as Fast and Autonomy have already built these
capabilities into their own products.
These companies can point to some sophisticated applications of
their technologies: the rapid retrieval of clinical trials data at
a major pharmaceuticals company; real-time access to customer data
by call centre operatives; the construction at one of the world’s
leading automotive companies of a “learning network” that delivers
content to employees from corporate applications and legacy
information systems; as well as third-party research libraries and
news websites.
That has led many search specialists to position Google’s Onebox
as an entry-level offering for small companies that want to provide
search at a departmental level.
Larger enterprises may need more sophisticated technologies. One
approach is that taken by enterprise search company Autonomy, which
uses advanced Bayesian techniques and background tracking
capabilities to take account of the context of a search query.
This works because information workers typically search for
whole ideas, while Google’s approach is limited to searching for
keywords.
“The search engine in a large company needs to understand the
meaning of the information, who is authorised to see it, to alert
others when it is searched for, and to ensure it is accessed and
used in strict compliance with legal and regulatory mandates,” says
Mike Lynch, chief executive of enterprise search company
Autonomy.
An emerging method for helping knowledge workers to access
information is to “search the search”, whereby the search engine
uses information about previous searches in the same area, both by
the current searcher and by their colleagues, to deliver a more
tailored result. Autonomy’s Idol product pools search information,
so that searches made by one team member can narrow the search made
by another.
Google Onebox is a combination of hardware and software designed
to index all forms of content on intranets and websites. Google
says its approach to enterprise search provides a robust, scalable
and cost-effective way to deploy businesses enterprise search.
David Chalmers, European programme manager at Google, says, from a
technical perspective, the Onebox approach is to simplify the
deployment and licensing of enterprise search. “We want to shield
IT from the complexity of hardware and software integration,” he
says.
“There is no need for a big-bang approach to search,” says
Chalmers, which is a strategy often used to deploy enterprise
search across large companies.
Users can start with a smaller box, suitable for the number of
documents they wish to index.
The starting price for Google Onebox is £21,000, including two
years’ support. This rises incrementally depending on the amount of
documents categorised.
“Users frequently complain that enterprise applications are hard
to learn, especially when they are needed infrequently,” says
Brown. “That leads to employee frustration, quantifiable training
costs and lost time associated with finding, accessing, and using
information stored deep inside CRM systems, document repositories,
corporate directories, portals and intranet sites.
“The idea that, just like on Google.com, two keywords and a
search box will let them retrieve a preformatted live purchase
order from an enterprise system without leaving the familiar search
interface, is very compelling.”
And that idea is already attracting some interest. Google does
not reveal exactly how big its enterprise search business is, other
than to say it is about 1% of revenue, which suggests sales of
about £11m in its latest quarter. It does claim more than 3,000
customers and enterprise sales growth in excess of 100% last
year.
Gartner values the enterprise search market at £200m this year,
up 10% from last year.
So, although there is a place for high-end enterprise search, it
looks as though businesses will adopt Google. “At its core, Onebox
makes searchable information useful. It breaks from the traditional
notion that search is just a list of links and lets IT departments
deliver highly relevant, up-to-date, useful information directly to
users based on what they ask for: not what information designers
think they want,” says Brown.