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."