(Full disclosure: I worked for EMC/Documentum until recently.)
I have blogged about enterprise search before here, here and here. By the way, what is with the blogging trend where people link to themselves using the famililar “here, here, and here” moniker? And many bloggers seem to be “musing” about something or another when we previously just “thought” about something.
Google’s most recent foray into the enterprise will probably be on par with their other endeavors: they’re always late to the game, but then they usually dominate by half-time. Federating disparate databases and applications as part of the search paradigm for business users is at least 7-8 years old. The major Content Management vendors have been doing this for ages: IBM (acquired Venetica), Documentum (acquired Ask Once), FileNet, Autonomy, Interwoven, and the list goes on. They all index each other’s content in addition to most ERP and RDBMS applications. They all have some creative ways of presenting clustered results from a federated search.
What I find interesting is that enterprise search has crawled its way out of the traditional realm of the Content Management vendors and found itself squarely in the hands of new storage infrastructure players like Scentric, Kazeon, and Abrevity — though I can’t say that I completely agree with their approach.
Google will likely popularize the technology in general. It’s obvious that enterprises are all acquiring applications that have their own unique data models that results in a myriad of challenges from a usabilty perspective. Enterprise search is one way of tackling the problem that presents the user with a very familiar interface: a single search dialogue.
