Rating: +0
Is this the where Google stands tall and says we are Enterprise ready, F100's have invested in this, but why are they not next to iXreveal or Autonomy on the shelf, is it a marketing shortfall, and are CIO's still looking at Google as a cunsumer org.
Thoughts?
Nepal,
Google Appliances accounts for only a very small fraction of the overall Google revenue stream. I never thought that their Appliances were well thought out from a product, marketing and futures perspective. They seemed more like a side business that someone came up with on the back of a napkin, only because they could. It does makes some sense, "let's skinny down the search engine, install it on a box, add some admin interfaces, paint the box gold, create a price sheet and wait for orders to come in". I'm not sure that the plan was ever anything more than that.
The market for corporate search has grown to much greater than full-text indexing, search and retrieve. Note that open source communities, such as Lucene, have really leveled the commercial playing field so the commercial entries have to offer a lot more to add value over and above what you can get from Lucene for example.
And this is certainly in the area of more sophisticated algorithms, latent semantic indexing for example, that provide "conceptual search" capabilities. The capability to search for "migraine headache" and return search results where the conversation contained "I need something stronger, can you get some Bayer" and the key words migraine or headache were never in the text of the record.
Also in the area of content analytics. Imagine searching all corporate content (conversations from Instant Messages, Email Messages, Inter-office Memorandums, External Correspondence, General Office Documents, etc.) for topics such as "Child Care" and generating a bar chart by day, date, time, LDAP group, Correspondence Type, that tells you how often the topic of "Child Care" is being discussed within the organization, then drilling down, etc. An executive HR team can possibly use these analytics to measure the "pulse" of the organization for the purpose of providing a better quality of human resource services. And on the other hand, imagine having those capabilities and monitoring the "pulse" of your Investment Trading area for "Corporate Greed" or "White Collar Crime" - Maybe Enron could've been nipped in the bud long before it got out of hand.
There is also a hidden legal risk with Corporate Desktop Search. I blogged on this awhile back -
http://compliance.typepad.com/compliance/2006/07/google_desktop_.html
Good Luck,
Peter
May 2008
* http://compliance.typepad.com/compliance/2006/07/google_desktop_.html
* http://www.csi1000.com