Google unveils enterprise applications search with big-name backing

Consumer search darling Google shared the stage with a gaggle of prominent enterprise application vendors Wednesday to announce Google OneBox for Enterprise, a new feature that will enable the company's Google Search Appliances to do real-time searches on business applications.

The OneBox feature allows Google Search Appliances to find and present business data from applications by Oracle, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com, SAS, and Cognos, which announced extensions for OneBox.

The news shored up Google's enterprise bona fides just one day before the company's first quarter earnings announcement. Brand and buzz aside, experts say Google still has a long way to go before it can compete head-to-head with pure-play enterprise search vendors.

The OneBox announcement was part of a slew of enterprise-focused news Wednesday, including a new Enterprise Developer Community with SDKs, documentation and a forum for partners and developers to build applications around Google's enterprise search technology, and incremental feature and performance enhancements. Google also announced a smaller and more capable Google Mini, which is aimed at SMBs.

“OneBox” is a concept that is well established in Google's consumer search services. It refers to the ability of the search engine to highlight specific types of dynamic information, like weather or stock prices, in the search results, along with static search results. For example, a search for "Boston weather" will return a high-level link with the forecast for Boston, Massachusetts. 

Coupled with Google Search Appliance, OneBox allows information from business applications, such as contacts, calendar entries, sales leads or purchase orders to be searched and returned in a way that is easily grasped by the user, said David Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google's Enterprise business unit.

"We're tapping into information inside the business application. It's not just documents, but facts and trends," Girouard said.

Google's partnership announcements are at least as important as the OneBox feature, he said.

Customers using Cisco's Unified Communications System will be able to use the Google OneBox for Enterprise to find rich media conference information, including calendar events and missed call logs, said Joe Burton, director of engineering for Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit.

The business intelligence software vendor Cognos will unveil Cognos Go!, a module for Cognos 8 and for IBM's OmniFind enterprise search. Go! has modules for displaying report data like graphs and charts, visual representations of metrics stored in Cognos and business intelligence reports, analysis and dashboards relevant to a search, the company said.

OneBox gives Cognos customers the ability to search unstructured business intelligence data, said Paul Hulford, senior product marketing manager at Cognos.

Previous versions of Google's Search Appliance did a fine job of indexing Cognos data, but couldn't understand the business intelligence that gave context and meaning to that data, he said.

"It's not just the data point, it's how it's laid out -- the titles and descriptions. Without business intelligence, if you're just accessing the raw data, you lose those elements and your ability to turn the information into something that has value is limited," he said.