Why Enterprise Search doesn’t solve the problem of product data access

Enterprise search is not a new category. It’s been around for some time now. I’m sure you are familiar with it. The intent of enterprise search was, and still is, to distinguish the search for data within a company from that of searching the web. The popularity of web search (think Google) inspired the creating of intranet (or behind the firewall) search.

I recently read an interesting article discussing various aspects of enterprise search, “Why is Enterprise Search more complex than web or desktop search?”. Here is my favorite passage from the article:

Therefore Enterprise search is a bigger challenge in comparison with web search or desktop search. A lot of tools are available to index your data in your Enterprise. For instance Microsoft Search Server 2008, Fulltext index of SQL Server, Autonomy a leader in Enterprise Search.

However these tools index the data on the same way as web search. They are not aware of the security model in your enterprise application. With these tools, you still need to implement your security model in the search application. In combination with the configuration and deployment of these tools your enterprise application can get very complex.

The passage made me think of what we do at Inforbix and why it’s different from enterprise search. Inforbix scans and indexes product data located in multiple places. Think about it as a search crawler. However, here is the major difference from enterprise search: Product Data Applications. Product data applications address specific tasks related to data access. By taking advantage of semantic technology or how files are linked together, data is not only accessed, but also presented in meaningful and helpful ways. Navigate your browser here to learn more.

Conclusion. Inforbix helps people access product data regardless of where it is located in a manufacturing company. We would love to learn more about your product access problems. What is important to you when accessing data? What data access challenges are causing you the most pain? What types of data did you want to access which was out of reach to you? Share your thoughts with us.

Best, Oleg

Eric Rogge

Hi Oleg,
I definitely agree on your point that many Enterprise Search products have limited security support capabilities and therefore may not be sufficient for Product Data Access needs. At Exalead, as you may know, we’ve integrated Exalead into Enovia, and have a growing number of satisfied Exalead/ENOVIA customers who find Exalead CloudView equal to the security challenges. On another point of agreement, we think that Search-Based Applications (SBAs), like those from Exalead, are the newest and most valuable direction for search and related technologies. SBAs, which serve information needs for specific business functions like PLM, can be built to far surpass the capabilities of one-size-fits-all Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search, like Enterprise Data Warehouses and even Enterprise applications can only provide lowest-common-denominator functionality. We also agree that having state-of-the-art semantic and data crawling capabilities is key. That’s why Exalead’s Semantic Factory has been tested against the web, with our private-cloud-hosted web search engine (www.exalead.com/search) now indexing over 16 billion pages.
Regards,
Eric Rogge
Exalead

http://www.inforbix.com oleg@inforbix

Eric, thanks for commenting! Do you have any examples of videos how Exalead Semantic Factory is working with manufacturing / PLM data? Thanks, Oleg

http://peeppull.com/ Adu Fuvahmulakuge

An enterprise search system provides extensive capabilities for searching any number of structured and unstructured data sources with a single query. The enterprise search system provides fast query response times and a consolidated, ranked result set that enables you to easily locate the information that you need.

http://www.inforbix.com oleg@inforbix

Adu, in my view, most of the search systems fails when face complex enterprise data. Structured data, security and performance are top -3 problems. Vertical specialization is important as well. What system do you refer as the best enterprise search example?