|
|
Safe Enterprise Search From Oracle
|
|
Companies must take steps to ensure that the systems delivering information to decision-makers are aligned both with business activities and with corporate goals and objectives. The discipline that guides this is Performance Management.
|
|
|
Summary
Enterprise search capabilities are a high priority for many enterprise architecture and application technology teams because they can simplify end users’ access to critical business information. Though they often fail to present truly relevant results, consumer search engines from Google and Yahoo have raised expectations among enterprise users, who now expect their own organizations to provide similar capabilities. Secure Enterprise Search is Oracle’s latest effort to play a major role in information management and add robustness to business intelligence (BI) deployments. Ventana Research believes enterprise search will be a key differentiating technology, one that potentially can deliver a significant competitive advantage to companies that use it effectively. Oracle’s latest release will help organizations gain additional value from existing investments in Oracle’s and third-party repositories by bringing relevant text, documents and data to business users’ fingertips.
Assessment
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, a stand-alone product introduced in March 2006, offers enterprise indexing and search capabilities not found in many rival products. It can do robust searches of virtually any form of content, including databases, files, e-mail, text documents and external sources such as the Internet. We believe that Oracle’s search capabilities have been overlooked because the company historically has presented them as part of its database, not as a separate product. In addition, many organizations consider enterprise search to be a middle-tier application service and not part of a top-tier database. Oracle’s new enterprise search product replaces older technology, Oracle Ultra Search, which continues only in maintenance mode for Oracle.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search performs searches by keyword, proximity, natural language and semantics across relational and hierarchical data models. It supports 32 languages and has half a million English and French terms in its reference knowledge base to provide language context to searches. Organizations can embed these search capabilities directly into existing Oracle applications, application servers and BI deployments, providing immediate support for business users who don’t want to switch to other applications. In addition, Oracle has provided analytics that can determine which crawlers and indexes to tune to achieve the fastest results. But its key distinction is secure search, which provides protection for proprietary information by requiring authentication for access to the search engine.
Version 10.1.8, released early in 2007, offers more connectors to third-party content repositories, including those from Documentum; OpenText and its recently acquired Hummingbird product; IBM and the products it acquired from FileNet; Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint; and Oracle and Siebel applications. The release also uses Clarabridge’s BI Search connectors, which can access BI system content, and Inxight, which dynamically clusters result sets into relevant groups such as people, companies and places. Ventana Research believes that Oracle’s dramatically more open approach to enterprise search will resonate with business users and those in IT who support them, as will this product’s ability to operate independently of Oracle databases and applications.
Market Impact
The market for enterprise search has grown dramatically in the last two years. Many large and midsize organizations now are evaluating the technology for use in their enterprise information architectures. Oracle’s new approach and technology have made a splash, while neither IBM nor Microsoft is marketing its search technologies aggressively or touting a strong role it plans to play in enterprise search. Among other competitors, SAP’s re-engineered approach to enterprise search is yet to prove itself in the market. OpenText’s acquisition of Hummingbird has not yet advanced its position significantly, while Autonomy is working to digest Verity and has not been vocal about its position. Google is taking an aggressive approach with Google Enterprise and is partnering with BI vendors to put a more trusted enterprise face to the technology. But Google, with little knowledge of the enterprise and little customization available to its appliance, will not be ready to compete strongly against Oracle. Against the backdrop of this activity, Oracle’s decision to embrace all forms of content and provide integration with both its enterprise applications and third-party repositories is a progressive one that addresses a key evaluation requirement of many customer organizations.
Recommendation
The need for enterprise search has become obvious. The ability of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search to bring together information from enterprise applications, content and data repositories and the Internet in a single secure interface is a step forward. It also is the first product in which a vendor has advanced its own technology while embracing other companies’ crawlers and content repositories. We view Oracle’s secure enterprise capabilities and its willingness to integrate with third-party systems as a welcome approach that could have a significant impact on the market. Ventana Research believes that enterprise search capabilities will simplify the lives of business users and enable them to make critical decisions more quickly. For that reason, we advise companies that are evaluating enterprise search technologies to consider Oracle’s offering.About the Author Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research, and drives the global performance management research agenda, which covers both business and technology areas. He researches the specific areas of Workforce Performance Management and Business Process Management. He is also the Director of the Intelligent Business Performance Management Conference and the community editor of IntelligentBPM.com, the industry's first independent forum for information, news, and discussion about business performance management. An industry veteran with more than 17 years of industry experience in business and technology, before founding Ventana Research, Mark worked at companies including SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software. Mark can be contacted at .
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Oracle #1 in Business Analytics According to IDC Research
|
The Business Intelligence Search Engine has all the answers.
|
Find all you need on The Business Intelligence Search Engine.
|
|
|
|
|
|
