Posted on 13 Dec 2006
IBM and Yahoo! Team Up in Enterprise Search
IBM and Yahoo! released software that search corporate computer network, this software is known as IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. According to IBM’s press release, this software is a no-cost and entry level product developed to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to Intranet and Web search. Unlike other enterprise search solutions that can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and implement, the new offering from IBM with Web search services powered by Yahoo! can be downloaded for free and is simple to install and use with existing hardware.
In term of functionality, this software support up to 500,000 documents per server, more than 200 file types and documents in more than 30 languages. It provides live search, and also cross-platform full text indexing by using the open source Lucene indexing library.
The bottom line is this new software offering would help in expanding the market shares of IBM and Yahoo! in the search industry respectively. It is a win-win game for them. For IBM, they have the high resolution softwares such as OmniFind Enterprise Edition that price at US562.50 to US18,750 annually and OmniFind Discovery Edition that range from US4,000 to US75,000 annually. I believed the back-end technology for these Enterprise and Discovery Editions is the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). On the other hand, the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is the software that cater for the mass market. That’s why it offered in no-cost. I believed IBM has turned some features off in order to make this software for the lower-end markets. IBM’s strategy is simply this: they designed the high-end softwares first, such as OmniFind Enterprise Edition and OmniFind Discovery Edition, and then now they diffused down to the lower-end software like this one, i.e. OmniFind Yahoo! Edition as competitive upgrade. For most of the demanding customers, they would likely to try this OmniFind Yahoo! Edition and later upgrade to OmniFind Enterprise or Discovery Edition depending which one meet their needs. In short, IBM is pursuing the versioning in their product strategy.
On the other hand, Yahoo! also benefited from this software launched. As the above picture showed, the interface is Yahoo! The search results listed in the same layout as the usual Yahoo! Web search but without advertisements appear on the screen. However, the search results will fully integrated with Yahoo! Search, providing one-click access to send queries to Yahoo! Web, image, video, audio, directory, local and news search services. Thus, it would eventually help in increase Yahoo! search engine traffic.
This is a win-win strategic alliance for IBM and Yahoo! IBM seems to be strengthening its brand name in enterprise search and Yahoo! is gaining popularity in Web search among the corporate users.
