Thursday, January 12, 2006

Google launches new corporate search solutions

We literally just penned a piece commenting on Henry Blodget, ex-Merrill Lynch internet analsyt, about Google's rick of becoming overly reliant on one source of revenues - online ad sales.

Well, they must have been reading our pieces, beacuse straight on the back of it they announce a couple of brand new corporate document search appliances. Which don't make money through ads - but through good old license fees!

They are now offering three Google "Mini" search appliances, used by small to mid-sized companies, including systems that can find up to 200,000 internal documents that sells for $5,995, and a 300,000 document search appliance selling for $8,995.

Search appliances are a combination of hardware and software that can cull through a wide variety of documents by office workers inside an organization, or used externally to allow customers to search through documents on a company's Web site.

And corporate search is becoming a growing trend. At the top end you only have to look at Autonomy to see how much money can be made. The question is can Google pump serious revenues out of their search appliances. It's too early to tell, but they do have a neat and cost effective solution for SME's and few others have do.

The question is is the demand there and do Google have the ability to market effectively and service this sector. Let's see.

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