IBM Jostles For The Number One Spot In Enterprise Search

December 14, 2006: While its name is not as quirky as Google, IBM's OmniFind is set to shake up the search market in 2007 as the big boys jostle for poll position. Announced yesterday, IBM is offering a free, entry level version of its OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, leveraging users’ familiarity with the Yahoo! interface.

At the enterprise level, OmniFind is designed to aide searching content inside and outside the organisation and will be in direct competition with Google's Enterprise Search appliance, as well as Microsoft's Office 2007 SharePoint Server for Search (MOSS).

Ovum information management analyst, Mike Davis says, "We believe this could be highly disruptive in the enterprise search space. The free to download product offers basic search facilities using an interface already familiar to millions of Yahoo.com users."

Says Davis: "Microsoft had already recognised that Google with the GSA was gaining in smaller organisations, and developed MOSS within the Office 2007 System to claim back some of the search arena that Microsoft believes is its own. But with IBM stepping into the field at the same time with OYE, the competition will be even more aggressive, something that can only be good for those organisations who don't want to pay through the nose for search products with feature they don't need."

OmniFind will index up to 500,000 documents or web pages, supporting over 200 document types and 30 different languages. While the basic edition is free, IBM is offering a managed twenty-four-seven support for tidy $1,999 per server per year. "But in another challenge to Google," says Davis, "the point of contact is by telephone to a real person in a support centre, rather than by email."

There are three tiers to IBM's enterprise Omnifind range. Beginning with V8.4, IBM search technologies are delivered as IBM OmniFind products. The full-scale enterprise edition is IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition, while the Starter Edition targerts smaller scale department-level search needs. IBM's managed search tool for customer and partner-facing solutions is labelled the Discovery Edition.

The key message by IBM is ease of deployment, security and an upgrade path for customers using smaller editions.

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