Enterprise search is less murky this week, as Cognos announced it teamed up with Google and IBM to take advantage of its enterprise search software.
Running on top of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
suite beginning in May, Go! Search will allow corporate users to access reports, analysis, dashboards and alerts through Google’s new OneBox for Enterprise software.
The service will also integrate with IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator
OmniFind Edition, allowing users to find and analyze information by
searching business intelligence data managed by Cognos.
The announcements point to the evolving convergence of enterprise search
engine technology and business intelligence, which helps measure the
performance of corporations.
The idea is that using the immediacy of search technologies to render
structured data formats in an easily viewable, custom portal will be
appealing to customers concerned about finding data stored on their
computers.
Paul Hulford, senior product marketing manager at Cognos, said Go! Search
addresses the problem corporate customers have of trying to find specific
reports from a repository that numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
“An individual user may have a lot of difficulty trying to find reports that
are relevant to their particular query and they often end up creating new
reports or at least putting requests into IT for new reports,” Hulford
said.
Go! Search sniffs out all of the content in a report, allowing users to use
their own terms, such as product names or employee names, when they’re
looking for data.
As the first offering from its partnership with Google, Cognos will embed a
customizable module with every Google OneBox for Enterprise, letting
companies allow any end user to gain access to business information.
Users can simply type keywords and phrases into the Google search bar and
grab relevant Cognos BI content, hopefully helping users to make better
business decisions, Hulford said.
Results are displayed as graphical charts, tables and maps, as well as a
visual representation of a performance metric and its status. The service also
presents the most relevant links to alerts, dashboards, reports or analysis.
Similarly, Go! Search will allow search results to be published and indexed by IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind
Edition, the IBM enterprise search platform.
OmniFind quickly searches
intranets, extranets, relational databases, file systems and content
repositories.
Hulford said corporate users using the OmniFind software will be able to use
basic keywords and phrases to find relevant Cognos 8 BI content in the
search results.