In Search Of Business DataIn Search Of Business Data

It's so logical. Large companies increasingly need sophisticated search technologies to sift through exhaustive content inventories. They're looking to get a handle on their mushrooming data and turn it into knowledge that will help employees, partners, and customers make more informed business decisions.

Meanwhile, consumer search-engine companies are seeking greener pastures because the Internet advertising market has dried up. These previously consumer-focused search firms are turning their attention to the business market. The question is whether they can compete in a market that requires deep integration into back-end systems and a thorough understanding of corporate behavior.

Companies known for their consumer search engines, such as Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, and Northern Light, are looking to sell a variety of business tools built around their search technologies. Some are integrating search engines into intranets, others are powering customer-facing Web sites, and some are helping companies improve access to valuable data.

Several recent developments highlight this trend. Northern Light shut down its free consumer Web-search site and sold its existing search-engine and taxonomy technology to consulting firm divine Inc. Earlier this month, Ask Jeeves acquired the technology of Octopus Software Inc. to connect its search technology with a variety of back-end systems. The company says the acquisition will bolster its ability to deliver "connected self-service," which combines natural-language search with analytics to create a closed-loop feedback system for customers. "The ability to connect to those core business systems will really ratchet it up to the next level," says James Speer, product manager for Jeeves Solutions, the enterprise arm of Ask Jeeves.

Inktomi has formed a collection of partnerships with content-management and portal firms in an attempt to reach deeper into corporate customers' systems.

Does all this represent a collective act of desperation? Perhaps. The search-engine vendors will have to scurry to deliver on their promise, Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says. Traditional search companies are going to find it tough to compete with the likes of Autonomy Corp. and Verity Inc., which have entrenched themselves with enterprise customers by offering a deeply integrated approach to categorizing and presenting content. "Just bringing in a new HTML search engine won't be viewed by most enterprise buyers as a silver-bullet solution," he says.

Enterprise vendors who've become adept at bridging content management, knowledge management, and search capabilities aren't especially concerned that the consumer upstarts will take their business.

Helping a company provide access to the widest possible swath of data is much more than search, says Prabhakar Raghavan, Verity's chief technology officer. He says truly unlocking content requires the ability to build and populate taxonomies, add structure to unstructured data, and fully understand what he calls "social networks," or the way people interact with each other and the data they use, and how those interactions affect each other. For that reason, he considers the consumer-search companies more of a curiosity on a quest for revenue than a real competitive threat. "We're watchful, but we're not by any means worried," Raghavan says. "They're like the guy who was asked why he robbed the bank and he answered: 'That's where the money is.' "

The time is fast approaching when the question won't be so much whether a company has enterprise search capabilities, but what it's doing with them, says Larry Quinlan, global CIO for Deloitte Consulting. "It's about embedding search into the infrastructure," he says. "We're finding search to be important throughout the enterprise in a variety of functions." Deloitte, a Verity customer since 1998, recently completed an upgrade to its vendor's K2 Enterprise portal infrastructure.

This doesn't mean some companies don't see value in consumer search-engine companies. Businesses in all industries are deploying search technology to achieve increased efficiency, cost reduction, and asset maximization. Most achieve success, regardless of which search vendor they turn to.

When Agilent Technologies Inc. broke off from Hewlett-Packard in 1999, it wanted to continue a program that HP had developed to deliver syndicated market research online. For five years, that program had provided searchable access to scanned research. But after deciding that neither buying the service from HP nor cloning it for its own purposes was feasible, the Palo Alto, Calif., company chose Northern Light's content-integration service, SinglePoint, as the basis for its Intelliport research portal. The service met all of Agilent's needs: It provided integrated search capabilities for accessing the research in which the company has invested; it was an outsourced service that Northern Light could deliver from a server on Agilent's network; it offered an off-the-shelf simplicity that didn't require customization; and it provided global-search capabilities that would let Intelliport users access external Web data such as newswire services.

Today, 1,800 of Agilent's 35,000 employees use Intelliport, a number that Ruth Van Dyke, market research program manager, considers a success. The employees accessing Intelliport are especially pleased with the absence of a gatekeeper, as well as the ability to access all the research Agilent buys from a single point, she says. The only complaint: not enough data, though Van Dyke points out that's a function of what Agilent is willing to spend, not what the SinglePoint technology is able to deliver.

Some companies are simply looking for search engines that reside on their customer-facing Web sites. Millipore Corp. saw that the volume of content on its 7-year-old site was outgrowing its original search engine. As a result, the Bedford, Mass., company, which relies on its site to sell a line of 5,500 bioscience products such as filters and lab water to university researchers and pharmaceutical companies, was devoting four employee-hours per week maintaining the search engine.

After interviewing a handful of search vendors, Millipore went with Inktomi's enterprise search technology, in large part because it could handle translations into Japanese and European languages without needing content modifications by Millipore's IT staff. The technology has delivered precisely what Millipore sought, says Jeff O'Halloran, the company's manager of Internet services. "Maintenance has been a breeze. It pretty much runs by itself," O'Halloran says. "I don't know if we've spent four hours on it in the last month."

The new search engine also lets Millipore generate reports on the most frequently used search terms, making it possible to more logically organize data based on user preferences. It's too early to quantify the bottom-line impact, O'Halloran says, but he believes Inktomi's technology has paid for itself since it was deployed last April.

Whereas Northern Light had been selling its search, classification, and taxonomy technologies to business customers for several years, Inktomi jumped into the business-to-business market with its June 2000 acquisition of Ultraseek Corp. from Disney Co.'s failed Go .com portal. Ultraseek had established itself as a search technology for company portals, but Inktomi has taken that capability further by forming partnerships and alliances with an array of content-management and portal firms, including BroadVision, Documentum, Epicentric, IBM, Interwoven, Netegrity, Plumtree, and Viador. Its goal is to tap into a wider array of information repositories, such as CRM systems and ERP systems and company databases.

Inktomi is trying to help customers refine their search capabilities so that all company data can be accessed via a single search engine, says Troy Toman, Inktomi's VP of enterprise solutions. But Toman says Inktomi is trying to accomplish this by offering the flexibility to work with the chaotic nature of the Internet without tying it down. "We're not trying to propose a structure or procedure," he says. "If you look at what's made the Internet so successful, it's the chaos."

Sometimes, chaos isn't desirable. Just ask anyone who maintains heavy capital equipment about the reams of technical specifications that accompany each part. Enigma Inc. has tackled that problem with targeted software offerings that feature a powerful search component. The company's core product, known as 3C, is an application for equipment manufacturers that lets them easily convert all their technical manuals into XML and deliver them to parts dealers and equipment operators in a single, searchable application.

Enigma has gone one step further with the release this month of a component information system that targets equipment operators, giving them access to all of the manuals they get from a myriad of vendors. With either product, a pilot application will cost $200,000 to $500,000; an expanded implementation that integrates into inventory and order-management systems will cost as much as $2 million.

Perkins Engines Co., a Petersborough, United Kingdom, maker of small and midsize engines, wasn't intimidated by the cost of the pilot application. Ian McGrady, E-business project director, says the company, a division of Caterpillar Inc., has seen significant benefits from its investment in the "low hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Perkins previously had many service and parts manuals, service bulletins, and parts number changes, which it distributed via CD. McGrady says he couldn't guarantee that the information would be up-to-date on delivery. The company, which makes engines for Caterpillar and a host of agricultural and energy companies, was losing business to other manufacturers because inexperienced sales clerks didn't know when they needed to sell crucial companion parts or suggest parts replacements.

What 3C gave Perkins is an intelligent application that offers such suggestions because its search engine can take highly unstructured data and make connections between seemingly unrelated bits of information. The application is being delivered to parts dealers as a DVD that's configured to receive live updates from a secure extranet site. During the second quarter, Perkins will begin testing a Web-based application, with general rollout making the DVDs obsolete by year's end.

But even the less-elegant DVD distribution is paying dividends. One dealer that had been calling Perkins' distribution center seven times a day now calls just once every two weeks, McGrady says. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to our distribution channel," he says. McGrady expects a full return on investment within 12 months.

It's these kinds of deeply integrated tools that may prove difficult for traditional search companies to compete with, especially given that many large corporate customers have experience with search technologies. "I defy you to find a Fortune 2000 company that doesn't have at least one or two major search installations," says Whit Andrews, a research director at Gartner. For such mature search customers, he says, the biggest problem is the inability to index dynamic content stored in content repositories and static content residing in databases so that both can be accessible in the same search. "The better you get at providing a universal interface to enterprise content, the more useful the product is," he says.

To that extent, Andrews says Autonomy and Verity are in a class by themselves, with Inktomi, iPhrase, and Lotus, making advances of late. He says Microsoft, which has been refining search technology for at least 10 years, remains a dark horse for whom search will always be a component of its software products.