IBM-Yahoo Pairing Should Spark Price And Feature War In Enterprise SearchIBM-Yahoo Pairing Should Spark Price And Feature War In Enterprise Search

From Google To SAP, big vendors have their eyes on this market

Mary Hayes Weier, Contributor

December 16, 2006

3 Min Read
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Enter SAP And Oracle
That's where companies like SAP and Oracle see a chance to move in. "The world is moving from document and text search into the area of application search," says Dennis Moore, SAP's general manager of emerging solutions. SAP's enterprise search, in beta with a few dozen customers, should be a commercial product next year, available to search from PCs and also on smartphones so employees can tap applications and databases remotely. SAP says the system can search its and other vendors' applications, breaking down the query and sending it to the appropriate back-end applications to search for data, showing only what your access rights allow. "Only application vendors can really do that," Moore says. The catch? SAP Enterprise Search will be available only as part of a broader SAP software license. Microsoft and Oracle sell their search offerings in a similar way.

Google offers a way to get real-time business data off applications with Google OneBox for Enterprise, which became available in April. Cisco, Cognos, Employease, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAS are among the partners that provide links to their applications through OneBox.

LEVELS OF SEARCH

ENTRY LEVEL Search documents and Web pagesPrice: Less than $20,000Options: Coveo, Google Mini, IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 For Search

MIDTIER Documents and Web pages, plus structured data in databases and other apps; aids such as clustering to categorize resultsPrice: $20,000 to $80,000Options: Google Search appliance, IBM OmniFind, Oracle Secure Search 10G, SAP Enterprise Search (in beta)

TOP TIER Search billions of records, business rules engines, advanced clustering, multiple languages, high-end natural language processing, high-end structured data supportPrice: $80,000 and upOptions: Autonomy, Fast, Endeca, Vivisimo

Data: Forrester

Price Pressure
With the IBM-Yahoo announcement, enterprise search gets even more interesting. All enterprise search vendors are seeing strong sales, but the biggest success story is Google, which sold $50 million to $70 million of search appliances this year, estimates Matt Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research. The company's driven the entry-level segment almost entirely on its own with the Google Mini, starting at $1,995 for search- ing 50,000 documents. The Google Enterprise appliance costs $30,000 for searching 500,000 documents. IBM OmniFind Yahoo is marketed for searches of similar scale, and can be downloaded at Yahoo.com for free by companies looking to add basic search to intranets and Web sites, while relying on Yahoo for Internet search--precisely the market where Google's had success.

Expect a market shake-up. Besides the familiar Yahoo interface, the product is based on Lucene, an open source indexing core. "The bottom is going to drop out around price," predicts Brown. Other vendors will offer free entry-level offerings to grab market share. Features found in midrange enterprise search systems--such as clustering search results for easier perusal, access to databases and applications, and greater scalability--will find their way into entry-level systems of less than $20,000.

Meantime, demand for good enterprise search--making it as easy as consumer search--will keep rising. While most people research car purchases online, down to detailed price ranges and quality ratings, too often a salesperson can't answer a customer's product question because the relevant information isn't searchable. Says SAP's Moore: "That's the difference between making money and not making money."

-- with Thomas Claburn

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