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Quantity vs. Quality
As the Web Matures, consumers are:
- Returning again and again to sites that offer real quality
- Looking to interact with companies, not just absorb
- Expecting rewards for information shared
- Shopping for 'information rich' products, not commodities
- Demanding self-service
- Aligning themselves with brand names that they trust
SEEKING THE RIGHT DATA
By Cathleen Moore
OFFERING ENTERPRISES hope for digesting the exploding volume of internal and external content, search-and-categorization technologies are
pushing into enterprises to become essential elements of corporate portal infrastructure to power other content-driven applications.
First brought to prominence by the rise of the Web, search technology is now emerging as a valuable tool for calming the enterprise data storm,
according to analyst Guy Creese, research director at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.
"Search first became important because of the Web. The Web made people understand what search was," Creese says. "Search was unsexy
about two years ago ... but in the past year search technologies have just blossomed."
A solid search and categorization infrastructure that spans enterprise portals and other applications is a vital weapon for handling the deluge of
the content-pounding corporation, Creese says.
"[Search] is an important issue for enterprises because there is so much content now. If [companies] don't have a sophisticated way of finding that
content, they are blowing their investments in the content," Creese says. "Search is becoming much more of an infrastructure play, [highlighting]
how it works with other applications, like Web analytics or CRM. It is a tool you can apply in many different ways."
Illustrating the significance of organizing and finding information within enterprise portals, search software maker AltaVista and infrastructure
software vendors Autonomy and Verity this month agreed to provide search-and-automation functionality for IBM's WebSphere Portal Server.
In a similar vein, AltaVista recently announced a deal with Oracle intended to inject search capabilities into Oracle's enterprise-portal
initiative. Under the deal, AltaVista created two portal applications for Oracle 9iAS, designed to allow Oracle portal users the ability to access
both Web-based search and customized enterprise-search functionality.
According to Gary Bryan, director of business development at Autonomy, based in Cambridge, England, the capability of Autonomy's
infrastructure software to comprehend unstructured data is a valuable contribution to portal and other application environments.
"Once you have an understanding of the data itself, you can perform operations on it such as search," Bryansays. "To us, search is just one of
the things necessary for a total portal environment. Most portal environments give you a window into different data stores -- such as a
Notes database, an e-mail repository, or an Oracle database -- but don't tie them together. [Autonomy] can get an understanding at the data level
of what is in the data, and automatically relate those things together."
Meanwhile, search technology vendor iPhrase is developing connectors designed to bridge its natural language search-and-navigation platform
with corporate portal offerings from vendors such as Plumtree and Epicentric, according to Tony Frazier, vice president of product marketing at iPhrase.
The Cambridge, Mass-based company's One Step platform combines natural language understanding, information retrieval, and user
-interaction algorithms to interpret search requests and query all relevant data sources, officials said.
In addition to integration partnerships, several search-based infrastructure products have recently entered the market.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Verity last month rolled out K2E (K2 Enterprise), infrastructure software designed to integrate search and categorization
into corporate portals and intranets.
K2E's Social Networks feature helps people interact with data and documents they create, access, and search, according to Rajat
Mukherjee, principal software architect at Verity.
"In corporations, it is not just data interacting with data, but people interacting with data," Mukherjee says. The ability to use business rules
is critical to making taxonomies and data more appropriate and useful."
Another vendor making headway with search functionality is Santa Clara, Calif.-based Smartlogik, which recently unveiled two software products
designed to help enterprises find and use their content.
Smartlogik's Muscatstructure is a rules-based categorization engine that enables the development of taxonomies personalized to individual users,
according to Smartlogik officials. Smartlogik's natural-language search tool, Muscatdiscovery, lets users ask a question to locate content within
a corporation or partner network, or from external sources, such as the Internet.
The company's software is designed to run on Internet-based application server platforms, including Sun's Java J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)
and Microsoft's Com+, which can aid the process of linking the software to other corporate applications and systems, according to Smartlogik officials.
The combination of search and categorization is a powerful tool for enterprises, says Campbell Macpherson, marketing director at Smartlogik.
"It depends on the industry, but access to the right info at the right time lets you bring a drug to market sooner in the pharmaceutical industry, for
example," Macpherson says.
"No one buys search for [its own] sake; it is a business case to be put together on an individual basis," Macpherson says. "It can increase
productivity considerably by finding the right info quickly and [ultimately] improve ROI."
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