Oracle Corp. entered the stand-alone enterprise search market on Thursday with a new product that it hopes will do for corporate data what Google has done for public data on the Web.
Known as Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, the stand-alone search engine is for use by corporations seeking to ensure that only authorized staff are able to access sensitive business information.
“We’re very excited about this product,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive officer, during a keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2006 conference in Japan on Thursday. “It’s one of our biggest announcements for many, many years. It’s the result of years of innovation and hard work.”
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g will support the searching of a company’s databases, applications, file servers, repositories, Web portals and internal and external Web sites, according to Sandeepan Banerjee, director of product management for objects and extensibility with Oracle. The search engine is integrated with multiple user authentication systems so that a particular user will only be able to see search results tied to the information they are authorized to view, he said in a phone interview Wednesday.
“Our search tool understands which information goes to which user,” Greg Crider, senior director for technology marketing with Oracle, said during the phone interview.
That marks a key difference from Google, which doesn’t do well searching private data, said Ellison.
“There is a reason why public search is available and popular but no one yet has done a good job on secure search,” he said. “No one has done a good job yet searching private data, even though the private data is the most valuable data you have.” The system is built on an Oracle database, said Ellison.
“It’s a separate database that indexes all of your data,” he said. “There are crawlers, in a sense it is very similar to what Google does, but you’re not crawling the public Internet. You’re crawling and indexing all of your private databases, Microsoft Word files and all your data and building in a separate Oracle database all these indexes.”
As different as Google and Oracle’s new applications might be, there is one are where they are very similar: the interface. The Web interface to Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search shown during the keynote was very similar to the minimalist public Google search engine, with search types above a centrally placed text box and an “advanced search” link to the right of the box.
Oracle has 15 years of experience in full-text search technologies incorporating such capabilities into its databases, data warehouse software and business intelligence tools, according to Banerjee. However, the new software will be the company’s first stab at a stand-alone enterprise product, he said. Previously, a customer wanting such stand-alone capabilities would need to do their own development work to build on top of the Oracle Text search technologies, Banerjee added.
Ellison encouraged users to download the application and take it for a test drive before deciding whether to buy it or not.
“Just go ahead and download it from our site, it’s very easy to try,” he said. “Normally you buy an Oracle database product, your engineers work for a while, it’s really a pretty substantial project before you start returning value to your company. This is very unusual. Literally, within a day or two of installing this product you can start delivering this search capability to the people inside your organization.”
Recently, application vendors have begun to wake up to the potential of the enterprise search market which has experienced double-digit growth over the last few years, according to Sue Feldman, research vice president with IDC.
IBM Corp. already has its OmniFind search engine, while Microsoft Corp. has its Index Server software. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g is likely to shake up the enterprise search market still further, Feldman said in a phone interview Wednesday. “They [Oracle] have such a great installed base, they can have a real effect,” she added.
Oracle’s main rival in the enterprise applications arena, SAP AG, has its Trex search technology, but has yet to release it as a stand-alone search engine, she added. Last month, SAP announced plans to extend its search capabilities with the next major release of its NetWeaver application development and integration software set to allow the searching of both structured and unstructured data.
Being able to find a particular piece of information is becoming more and more important to companies, with enterprise search becoming “their interface to life online,” Feldman said.
Oracle is hoping its emphasis on simple installation and easy-of-use with a Web interface for its search engine may prove attractive compared with the offerings from long-standing players in the enterprise search space such as Autonomy Corp. PLC and Fast Search & Transfer ASA.
“Implementations can take from a day to six months depending on the complexity of the application,” IDC’s Feldman said, though she doubted that implementation issues were a problem for all customers. “Implementation has sometimes been a pain point [for customers] and sometimes not,” she added.
Oracle’s Crider said that legacy players in the enterprise search market can’t provide the kind of global support a company like Oracle can.
Meanwhile, traditional lower-end Internet search companies like Google Inc. are working hard at scaling up their offerings and adding in security features to appeal to enterprise users. “One of the main pain points for consumer search is security,” Feldman said. “That’s why Google recently teamed up with [consultancy and systems integrator] BearingPoint Inc.”
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g will be available worldwide sometime between now and May, according to Oracle’s Crider. User-based pricing is still being finalized and should be announced Monday, he said. The cost per central processing unit (CPU) will be US$30,000, Crider added.
Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney Inc. started beta testing Oracle’s stand-alone search engine in April 2005 and plans to go live with the software, according to an Oracle release. Another early user is Austrian National Bank. The department of physics at the University of Tokyo is also using the Oracle search engine for its portal Web site which is currently under development, Crider said
The theme for Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo is “Turnaround Japan — business revitalization and roles of IT,” with an emphasis on how companies can meet the challenges set by increasing globalization and regulatory changes through a mix of best practices and software.
