Google has been making steady strides into the enterprise market recently. But it’s a rather crowded field. Everyone and their mamma thinks they can offer a search product for business users just because they have some relative experience doing similar things for the internet at large. I’m bearish on these types of offerings that “integrate” end-user search capabilities with disparate repositories from a multitude of vendors. The IBM and Google link-up is slightly different, but generally speaking I don’t think that the Google Enterprise appliance will see wide adoption. Their’s one big reason: ACLs.
Access Control Lists determine who has access to what information, when, how, etc. If these search appliances fail to properly use the prescribed APIs that govern security, a major hole is blown right into the heart of IT. The public internet has more rudimentary ways of keeping search engine crawlers from indexing their content: they just don’t make it publicly available to the indexing engines. But in a corporate data center, it’s not quite that easy nor it is practical since the whole purpose is to have information stores available for users given the ACLs.
I know quite a bit about this space from years of keeping up with the technology and the players involved. The problem is one of federation. There’s too much data out there in different places that requires users to search with some application for each repository. Federation allows the repositories to be represented as a single entity for purposes of end-user access, but honoring the security models in place is a must. To honor the security model and nuances thereof takes time and effort. To make it worth while requires broad support of federated applications. That takes time and money and it begins to step way out of Google is best at doing — providing consumer search and content sensitive adverstising.
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