Cognos Partners To Improve Enterprise SearchCognos Partners To Improve Enterprise Search

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) and Cognos are moving to combine their respective expertise in enterprise search and business intelligence to move both technologies to a new level.

In an announcement Monday, the firms said they are joining the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP) with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence in a partnership to deliver a brace of corporate content directly to users in organizations whether they are sophisticated or novice BI consumers.

"We do enterprise search and we've been doing it for 10 years," said Rob Lancaster, vice president, FAST channel development, in an interview. "These are new segments coming together. The goal is to manage information to enable more efficient decision-making."

Cognos already has some 23,000 customers -- most in BI -- and it envisions using the FAST search engine to help the customers generate more and better data.

"The union of BI and enterprise search is a major innovation for both industries," said Patrick O'Leary, Cognos' vice president of strategic alliances, in a statement. "By enabling a variety of sophisticated enterprise search techniques, FAST provides knowledge workers access to unstructured information such as documents, images, audio, video, and e-mails, in addition to the consistent and trusted BI information from Cognos."

Noting that there is a growing need by organizations to prioritize search results -- to develop more meaningful results rather than just droves of links -- Lancaster said FAST's recently-announced Contextual Insight http://www.fastsearch.com/press.aspx?m=63&amid=2239 feature in its FAST ESP solution lends itself to targeting more meaningful data.

Noting that the partnership is already underway, Lancaster said the two firms expect to develop a number of solutions for individual customers; many of those would likely be tailored for use by others. He added that the companies expect systems integrators to also participate in the effort.

Ali Riaz, FAST president, said the goal of the partnership with Cognos is to provide enterprise users with simple one-click access to their relevant data. A key feature of the partnership is to open up enterprise search throughout entire organizations by harnessing Cognos' analytical capacities within FAST ESP.

An ultimate goal of the partnership is to enable users to spend more time on analysis and less time and effort searching.

The partnership is the latest in efforts by search engines to make enterprise search more relevant and user-friendly to IT users. Last month Google announced its OneBox for Enterprise technology. Cognos is among Google's partners.