For years, companies have had the technology to store data; what they lacked was an efficient and comprehensive way to sift through the reams to support business performance management (BPM) dashboards. Now, Hyperion Solutions Corp. and Google Inc. are teaming up to offer the first corporate store and search solution, called Smart Search, aimed to expedite BPM.
Smart Search is designed for use with Google's OneBox enterprise appliance. Like the consumer version of Google, Smart Search allows for searches based on key words, but that kind of search is insufficient to support an intricate BPM system, which depends on constant feeds of real-time information from a variety of sources within an enterprise. With Smart Search, a user is able to search the company's internal data, using not only key words but also company terms. "You might type in 'fourth-quarter cost of goods sold' and Smart Search will find items labeled COGS Q4," says product manager Vijay Lal. "It will look for office documents, spreadsheets and other structured data."
While other vendors have developed a basic search capability, Srikant Gokulnatha, senior director for product marketing at Hyperion, says the new product is unique, at least for the moment, in its ability to search across multiple pieces of information, looking through S-base cubes, reports, scorecards, etc., and then it can amass all this data into customized reports on the fly. "What this does," says Kevin Smith, partner program manager for Google's enterprise division, "is bring BPM and BI to the more casual user in a company."
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Hyperion's Smart Search is actually an enhancement for its System 9 software. It will be an integral part of the company's 9.3 release, but is also being provided to existing System 9 users as a free upgrade. "For us, we win by getting more people to buy BPM," explains Gokulnatha. "There's no reason for us to nickel and dime this."
Other vendors are also moving into the field with enhanced search engines. Business Objects SA, a business software provider based in San Jose, Calif. and Paris, is planning to release its Business Intelligence and Search tool in mid-2007, as part of its BusinessObjects XI Release 2 Productivity Suite. Like Smart Search, Business Objects' search tool will be able to query databases and applications directly, accessing both unstructured and structured data within and outside a firm's firewall, and then create new Web Intelligence reports in response to business questions. For example, the software company says, an ER doctor could use the tool to search within BI and externally through a broad set of data sources to find out quickly how many instances of food poisoning had been reported within the past 24 hours–information critical to determining the source of a food poisoning outbreak.
A few customers can see the possibilities. "With Smart Search, if one of our people is looking for information on something like 'student retention' or 'graduation rates,' not only will they find the information, but they'll also get the report or query that created that information, and they can extend and build off of those results," says John Rome, director of data administration and data warehousing at Arizona State University, where Smart Search will be used in conjunction with its Hyperion System 9 Business Intelligence system. "This is pretty powerful stuff."
Cindi Hawson, author of the blog BI Scorecard, and an industry analyst at ASK LLC who follows the business software industry, agrees. "I think the market at this point is underestimating it. It's opening up BPM to people we don't even think of as users today who will be able to formulate questions people aren't even thinking to ask yet," she says.
So far, customers are not exactly clamoring for a BI/BPM search engine. But "this may be a bit like the microwave oven, where nobody was clamoring for a big box that would heat up food with radio waves, but once it was invented, everyone had to have one in their kitchen," says Whit Andrews, an analyst with Gartner. "It's clearly a great idea."
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