Under the bonnet, SAS’ search solution integrates the new OneBox for Enterprise, launched yesterday, feature of Google’s Search Appliance with the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform.
OneBox is based on the same technology used by Google.com to serve up stock ticker information and weather reports. But it’s targeted at enterprise users looking to find information from all their internal applications through a single search box.
OneBox is bundled into the latest version of Google’s search appliance – a hardware and software product that adds search to an enterprise network. OneBox effectively extends that search to a company’s internal databases through a single search request.
Other enterprise software vendors to announce support for OneBox include Oracle, Cognos, Cisco, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Employease. These companies have also developed modules that allow their applications to interact with OneBox. Google hopes to encourage developers to create modules for other applications.
Joint SAS and Google customers will be able to activate OneBox to extend the real-time search capabilities across SAS BI repositories, allowing them to view BI information as part of a routine Google search by simply typing in keywords and phrases into the search bar.
Results are presented in order of relevance, much like any other Google search for local news or restaurant listings. For example, SAS BI users can type in Q2 sales and get a listing of pertinent reports, analysis and other BI data as well as links to other relevant information such as top customers or best performing salesperson for the same time period.
SAS says that all search results are first filtered through standard enterprise security protocols to ensure that the information returned adheres to individual user access rights.
SAS expects to roll out its search offering this summer. But its Google relationship won’t end here. SAS says it’s just the first of many joint technology initiatives it has planned around search and BI information sharing.
Google is excited to work with SAS to deliver BI information right from their Google search box. We’re aiming to make enterprise search as comprehensive and useful as web search and our partnership with SAS is a big step forward in that direction, said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise.
BI vendors are increasingly turning to search as a way to push BI capabilities out to the wider business masses. Business users are more comfortable using search engines than they are BI query and analysis tools. It’s this familiarity that BI vendors are looking to tap into – both as a way to gather relevant BI information for creating reports or analyzing data, or to find related intelligence when viewing a report.
However, SAS isn’t the first BI vendor to bring BI to search.
In early March, Information Builders Inc unveiled a new search component for its WebFocus enterprise reporting and analysis platform called WebFocus Intelligent Search. The software was developed in conjunction with Google and iWay Software (Information Builders’ data integration subsidiary).
Later that month, Cognos followed suit by launching Go! Search, which couples its Cognos 8 BI platform with search capabilities through collaboration with Google’s Search Appliance.
But not to be outdone by SAS, Cognos firm also expanded its Go! Search initiatives with two more announcements recently.
The first, predictably, is to also include pre-built support for surfacing Cognos-created BI information in OneBox. But Cognos goes further than just delivering search results in order of relevant data and related links. It can also return results in an instant, high-level view (displayed as a graphical chart, table or map) or as a set of related performance metrics.
The second is to offer integration into IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition – which is the long-winded branding for IBM’s enterprise search platform. This will allow Cognos reports, analyses, metrics and dashboards to be indexed and published by OmniFind.
The solution also supports UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), which is important for two reasons. It provides a framework for analyzing more interesting types of corporate data – namely text – and provides inter-change mechanism for pulling together structured data analysis and text analytics.
Cognos expect to roll out support in May this year.
MicroStrategy’s new report-centric packages offer reporting features comparable to Crystal Reports, but with greater data and user scalability, said Sanju Bansal, COO at Mclean, Virginia-based MicroStrategy.
