Partnerships with Cognos, Oracle and Salesforce.com are only the start as Google strives to build links with established enterprise software companies.Google has forged new partnerships with business software suppliers Oracle and Salesforce.com as it makes a big push into selling enterprise search features.
As previously reported, Google has also coupled with business intelligence software provider Cognos.
Google's partnerships with Oracle and Salesforce.com were reported by Business 2.0 journalist Erick Schonfeld.
Essentially, the companies are now set to blend their features together. Also, Google plans to let employees use the familiar-looking Google search feature to scour a corporate intranet.
The new relationships with incumbent enterprise software specialists could help provide the connections to the established enterprise software players that Google needs to be taken more seriously.
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"Google's enterprise search, to many people, seems to still feel like a here-today-gone-tomorrow offering," said Harry Collier, an Internet search expert and founder of search events company Infonortics, of Tetbury, England.
The new partnerships highlight how Google, which is best known for its Internet search feature, also sells hardware and software aimed at businesses that want to use souped-up versions of Google's search features.
In this way, Google stands alone from its major rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN Search engine, which tried and backed off enterprise versions of search.
Read more here about how Oracle is creating its own Google-like search feature.
Yet Google is giving it more than just a go. In a slumbering market for Internet search appliances, such as Google's lineup of Mini products, Google's 100 percent annual sales growth rate is unheard of.
At stake is the estimated $600 million annually that corporations spend to improve their computer networks' search and collaboration capabilities. Enterprise search falls into the category of "workforce optimization." Analysts at Datamonitor predict $1 billion in sales of such services and gear by 2006.
Google's enterprise division has about 2,000 corporate clients, which ranks far behind that of Verity, the market leader owned by Autonomy, which has an estimated 15,000 corporate clients, and Fast Search & Transfer, another enterprise search leader.
