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RSS feedsIT giant Oracle is set to take on enterprise search stalwarts Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer with its latest search system, which it claims provides security measures its rivals cannot match.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, announced last month by founder Larry Ellison, is a standalone enterprise search engine that offers a web interface for searching databases, enterprise content management applications, email, file systems and portals.
Oracle emphasises Secure Enterprise Search 10g’s ability to ensure that users see only those search results they are authorised to access.
Ellison describes it as “one of the biggest products in years”.
Andy Cleverly, Oracle director of technical marketing in Europe, told IWR that the engine behind the application had been in development for 17 years and was based on the text indexing that forms the backbone of the Oracle database products the company is famous for.
“It’s not something brand new and untested,” he said.
The difference between Secure Enterprise Search and previous Oracle search platforms is its ability to index. “Ultraseek [the last Oracle enterprise search tool] didn’t have the breadth,” said Cleverly. “We now have the ability to provide federated searching. It makes no sense to duplicate the indexes of other search engines.”
Oracle has been aggressively acquiring technology vendors such as business search developer TripleHop to bulk out its technological abilities.
Secure Enterprise Search 10g is not the first search application from the database specialist. Before Ultraseek, the company launched the Context search platform, but Secure Enterprise Search is widely seen as Oracle’s first all-out enterprise search offering ( click here for enterprise search news).
“Security is a tick in the feature box,” Cleverly said of rival enterprise search vendors’ systems. “They don’t have the degree of flexibility. Secure Enterprise Search 10g is an out-of-the-box application with an in-built knowledge of the databases and Oracle’s knowledge of working with data.
“Existing Oracle users are a target market, but this is a standalone product. I hope to see it being used by companies using IBM, Siebel and Peoplesoft applications.”
Oracle is confident it can shake up the market, but Cleverly doesn’t see the incumbent players such as Autonomy and Fast going away. Rather, as Oracle’s main ERP rival, SAP, also looks to enter the enterprise search market, organisations will have two choices for enterprise search: to adopt a platform from a search specialist, or the search platform developed by their chosen database provider.
