Google is announcing partnerships with several of the biggest enterprise software vendors. I’ve seen Cognos, Salesforce.com, Cisco, Employease, and Oracle mentioned as partners.
What it means is that Google is making the transition from unstructured to structured data, something they’ve started to do with natural language recognition on the Internet. But this, this is truly a revolutionary leap. What they’re doing is enabling their Google appliance to talk application API’s, both hosted and internal.
By the way, just imagine how relevant these searches will become when the results are marked up with Microformats. Not only will Google be able to apply its search algorithms to plain text, but the text will let Google know what it represents. Expect to see a lot more functionality built into the search front end when that happens (do a Yahoo Instant Search (http://instant.search.yahoo.com/) on Chicago Weather to see what kind of possibilities this opens up.)
I’m not sure how or if they’re going to open up the interface to connect to the Google appliance at any point, but what this does is give Google complete knowledge of pretty much everything going on in the company that’s being reported on. By giving their box hooks into Cognos and Oracle, they’ve exposed all internal reports to the appliance making their data searchable. (I would assume that you can set preferences regarding how often report data is refreshed.)
When you add salesforce.com integration into the mix as well, it’s pretty clear that their box is capable of calling Web services. That means that eventually, this box will be capable of querying any software, either internal or external to the enterprise, that provides a Web service API.
I’ve been dreaming of doing something similar for a long time. What the enterprise really needs is some type of agent that sits behind the firewall and aggregates internal and external data in one spot. And makes that data easy to search and navigate.
I’m guessing that pretty soon Google will announce an Google Box API that lets companies integrate their custom information stores in a structured way. Plop Microformats on top of, let the Box communicate with the Web, and you have plug and play systems integration.
-j
