Scoop: Google Enterprise Mashups to Suck in Data From Cognos, Oracle, and Salesforce.com
You don't tend to hear much about Google Enterprise, which consists mostly of Google's search appliance that companies can install in their own data centers and use to index their corporate data.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Enterprise has been built around an on-premises search appliance that indexes corporate information. Adding connectors for Cognos, Oracle and Salesforce.com shifts the product from searching a single corporate repository toward a common access layer across major business systems.
The significance is less the individual integrations than the position they give Google Enterprise: a search interface can become the place employees begin when the underlying records remain in separate applications.
First-order effects
- Google Enterprise customers gain a single search-oriented route into data held in Cognos, Oracle and Salesforce.com, reducing the need to start each lookup inside the originating application.
- Cognos, Oracle and Salesforce.com become data sources within Google's enterprise interface, while Google Enterprise becomes more useful in accounts that run those systems.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise-search rivals face pressure to match connectors to widely used business applications, because index quality alone is less valuable when key systems remain outside the search layer.
- Buyers can evaluate enterprise search as an integration decision as well as a retrieval tool, raising the importance of connector coverage alongside appliance deployment.
Third-order effects
- If enterprises adopt cross-application search interfaces, control over how workers discover business information may move toward the layer that indexes and presents data rather than the applications that originally store it.
The trend: Enterprise search is evolving from indexing corporate files into an integration layer spanning the business applications where operational data resides.