Ingram Micro, which claims to be the world’s largest tech distributor, will sell Google Search Appliance and Google Mini, its enterprise search boxes, worldwide under a freshly inked deal. The companies said the deal would give Google a cost-effective reach into the small-to-medium business and small-to-medium enterprise markets, as well as the government and education channels, worldwide.
Today, more than 9,000 companies of all sizes use the Google Mini or the Google Search Appliance to help employees and customers find information in their business as easily as they find information on the web using Google.com, said Dave Girouard, VP of Google Enterprise. He said the Ingram Micro deal would extend the product to many more business customers.
Both products are customizable and enable searches for company-specific information on a company’s intranet or Web site. They discover and retrieve information stored on a corporate Internet, web server, file server, content management system or other locations. Information can be discovered in more than 220 different file formats and in more than 100 languages, according to Google.
Google Mini is designed for web site search and for SMBs, while the Google Search Appliance is targeted at the mid-market and other data and e-file intense customers, such as legal firms, finance companies and medical offices.
The OneBox for Enterprise feature is also available on both products. It retrieves real-time information from any business application, including employee directories and calendars, CRM, ERP and BI systems.
