Enterprise Search: Powerful and at an Unbeatable Price

In the race to capture enterprise search users, IBM and Yahoo! have teamed up to offer free software that they’re calling the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. The technology is based on the Open Source Lucene search engine with enhancements by IBM, and it is packaged so that it is easy to just drop into web and desktop applications. The Yahoo! Edition provides a consistent search interface that allows organizations to search across web and corporate information. The free version of the OmniFind software has been available for about six months and downloaded more than 21,000 times.

In late June a new version of the Yahoo! Edition was released along with the news that other vendors are starting to create add-on tools around the product to enhance the software’s search capabilities. The companies include Groxis, Fortune Interactive, TnR Global and Cognos.

Groxis, a vendor specializing in visual search technology, created an add-on to OmniFind that targets users involved in complex library research.

Fortune Interactive‘s Feature Match capability adds to OmniFind the ability to learn from previous user searches and improves search engine optimization.

TnR Global created a Joomla component that enables search across corporate and content stored within the Joomla Web Content Management system.

Cognos 8 Go Search will help users find information within the Cognos 8 BI product, and it will also allow the search to span across web and enterprise data sources. The software allows a visual display of the information in the form of dashboards, reports, analytics, and business information metrics.

But the free Yahoo! edition is intended as an entry-level version of OmniFind. As an introductory product, a primary purpose of it is to allow IBM to try to up-sell users into a higher-end version. It’s a formula that integrates Open Source into a commercial company’s software strategy that is becoming increasingingly common: generate interest by offering usable and moderately powerful tools as free downloadable Open Source software and then attempt to up-sell more scalable and robust, more feature-laden versions of the software.

The Enterprise version of IBM OmniFind offers more powerful capabilities by tapping into capabilities found in the IBM-sponsored Open Source Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). The Enterprise version can perform semantic interpretation of search key words and various kinds of text analytics. The advanced features allow users to supplement their search capabilities by searching over specific kinds of things found in the unstructured content, like email addresses or phone numbers. The target audience of this version of OmniFind includes users of Lotus Domino and applications running on IBM’s WebSphere application server.

Enterprise Search is an area that’s heating up, one where companies like Google and FAST are fiercely battling. IBM’s OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is unique in its Open Source approach, one that may allow it to capture both market and mindshare.