Business software maker Oracle Corp. recently announced new software designed to sift through corporate networks, a major push into the red-hot search market dominated by Google Inc.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, which the company announced on March 1, scours and indexes enterprise data cubbies, including internal and external Web sites, databases, file servers, document repositories, enterprise content management systems, portals, e-mail systems and business applications. It tiptoes around data, though, mindful of corporate security policies.
For example, it would not let users peek at search results if they are not authorized to see the material.
It does that by direct integration with multiple user authentication systems, a hardened repository for storing the search index and a secure programming interface used to customize the search capabilities.
Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison unveiled the software in Tokyo, saying it is aimed at filling a gap left by Google, which dominates online searches and has pushed into individual computers with its desktop search software.
What Google does not do well is search private data. It searches public data very well, the World Wide Web. But most data we deal with is not public data, it is private data, personal data, Ellison said.
Illustrating the growing importance of the search market, Ellison described the software as "one of our biggest products in years."
Greg Crider, a senior director of product marketing for Oracle, said there are two major forces driving the need for brawny but well-behaved enterprise search.
First, users are now very accustomed to using search tools on the Internet, and they are accustomed to getting very fast results with an easy-to-use interface. Their employers, however, have to deal with other expectations—from the government, which enforces legislation to protect sensitive information, for example.
For example, public companies have to protect any information during their quiet periods, Crider said.
As far as the health care industry goes, companies have to deal with HIPAA and its strictures on handling patient information. Higher education, for its part, has to guard student records from misuse or exposure.
There is pressure for companies to control who has access to the information, Crider said. Yet users on the Internet hit search and get results in seconds.
Oracle’s press release quoted beta testers who gave the engine a thumbs-up.
We have been testing Oracle’s Search products for a number of months, and are very satisfied to see Oracle Secure Enterprise Search enter the market, Thomas Fuerle, director of Web operations, at Austrian National Bank, is quoted as saying.
We find that the Search quality is very compelling and our users can at last find all the information they want from a single search.
Companies such as top software company Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have also been rolling out new and updated search products as they try to chip away at Google’s dominance.
Rita Knox, an analyst at Gartner, said to bear in mind that Oracle has to throw its hat into the enterprise search ring, given the push into the space on the part of both Microsoft and IBM. It is something they had to have, she said.
Google has its enterprise-facing Google Mini search appliance, for one thing.
While Google is the darling of search engines, making it a potentially serious competitor to Oracle, it lacks some of the finesse that enterprises need in search—or "information access," as Gartner calls it, Knox said, including the ability to categorize and classify data.
"That is not Google," Knox said. "Some of it is precision, as well. Now, relevancy is based on what people are looking for rather than being able to analyze what content is about."
She pointed to Microsoft Vista’s search capabilities as one offering that Oracle will have to keep pace with when it arrives. Bigger than these players, of course, is Google.
Oracle’s software would have security measures built in to ensure users can only access data they are authorized to view, Ellison said.
Oracle is sitting pretty when it comes to search, Knox said, with its databases and business applications forming a huge content resource that people build their businesses on top of. “That becomes important: being able to get to it and make sure all confidentiality and all that information is secure," she said.
The search tool will be available by the end of May, Oracle said. No pricing for the product was disclosed.