Google Enterprise Mashups to Suck in Data From Cognos, Oracle, and Salesforce.com

Posted on April 19, 2006
Filed Under Enterprise Software |

So Google is going to be an “enterprise search company” yet again? They have been hawking that Google appliance for a couple of years, and now it appears that they figured out that they had to have some relationships with software vendors in order to do something more than keyword search.

I am not terribly impressed with the relationships that they are announcing, and in the case of Oracle it is just confusing considering that Oracle itself has been hogging the airwaves promoting their own enterprise search product (which I think is based on the IP they acquired with the Triplehop deal last year).

Insofar as the ability to search across systems from a single portal page using natural language, this is not a new idea and from my experience all I can say is that it looks better on Powerpoint than in actual implementation. Natural language search is notoriously difficult to pull off not because the natural language search itself is hard (this has been around since the early 1990’s) but because there never is a single point of answer for the query.

More power to Google if they can corral all these vendors to offer a search appliance that works for something more than keywords, but the single largest repository of enterprise transaction and master data in the business is SAP. Until Google can reliably interrogate an SAP system, and get around competing with Oracle, I would humbly suggest that their enterprise prospects will be limited. And that’s not even getting into the cultural differences between enterprise and consumer markets, the business model that Google is dependent upon, and the dynamics of relationship selling in enterprise.

Link via Om

Google is set to announce tomorrow a broad set of partnerships with enterprise software companies, including Cognos, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAS. The partnerships basically amount to Google and these enterprise software companies sharing APIs so that data from the various software systems can more easily be searched for through Google’s OneBox corporate homepage. Instead of Google Maps, now you will have mashups with Oracle databases, Cognos business intelligence software, and Salesforce.com customer info.

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