The storage giant's Documentum business will begin offering Google's desktop search capabilities as part of its enterprise content management tools.
EMC Corp. announced Tuesday that it has added Google Inc.'s Desktop Search tools to its Documentum business unit's enterprise content management products.
The storage giant, based in Hopkinton, Mass., said it added the Google technology to augment the search capabilities in its ECI (Enterprise Content Integration) package and expand the product's ability to scan much of the so-called unstructured data residing on workers' desktops.
The two firms said they had established an official partnership to streamline the manner in which their search tools work together, but offered no further details of the relationship.
Built on the same technology that has made Google the leading search engine in the world, the desktop system claims the ability to mine much of the data stored on a PC's hard drive, including traditional files such as Microsoft Office documents and less-structured information residing in e-mail and instant messaging applications.
EMC officials said it was its customers' desire to get a better handle on such unstructured data that led the firm to strike its deal with Google.
Since Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., gives its search tools away for free, EMC said it won't add anything to the price of its ECI lineup as a result of integrating the technologies.
Before partnering with Google, EMC had no plans to develop its own desktop search tools, said Lubor Ptacek, director of product marketing at Documentum. However, he said, Google's capabilities increase the scope of its enterprise search capacity to a significant extent.
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"Customers tell us this is hugely important because 70 to 80 percent of all corporate data is stored on workers' PCs," Ptacek said. "These companies need something beyond federated search to get to all this information on the desktop, and combined with our unified enterprise content management architecture, there's nothing else out there that can work across such a huge range of data repositories."
In addition to Google Desktop, EMC previously added links to Google's Web-based search into ECI, and it also offers customers the ability to integrate its content management system with the Google Search Appliance, a combination of hardware and software used for storing and searching large volumes of data.
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The Documentum ECI Services for Google Desktop for Enterprise package will be available later this quarter, the companies said.
EMC is using the Enterprise version of the product because it includes administrative tools meant to give companies greater control over how data queried by the technology is shared and protected, unlike the consumer version of Google Desktop.
Among the organizations that are already using the combined EMC-Google technologies are pharmaceutical companies, research firms and even government agencies tracking terrorist activity, Ptacek said.
By adding the desktop search capabilities to their existing federated search tools, these groups can better cross-reference their work and establish trends or patterns in specific types of data, he said.
"We don't want these types of workers to need to go to each content repository and search those on a one-by-one basis; we're expanding the capabilities of federated search to the user desktop, which has obvious benefits," Ptacek said.
"To solve real-world business problems you can't depend on applications that are narrowly focused on one content type, you need as many different sources of data as possible."
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