Classifiers Grab Search Partners

Scentric has become the latest data classification startup to join the Google Enterprise Professional program. The move highlights the growing synergy between search engines and data classifiers.

Kazeon, Mathon, and StoredIQ also have paid their $10,000 to join Google's program for integrating its Intranet search appliances with other vendors' wares. (See Content Classifiers Glom Onto Google.) The goal is to use the Google interface as the main enterprise portal for data organized by startups' tools for compliance, regulatory, and business purposes.

This means that for many IT managers, the purchase of a data classification product will also require investment in an enterprise search appliance. That could be pricey, considering that Google's Search Appliance starts at about $35,000, and most data classifiers at $50,000 or so.

It may be necessary to shell out the dough. Classification vendors need search engines for technical reasons. While most specialize in organizing and indexing data in granular ways, they don't all support the full roster of capabilities this may entail.

"There is a mutually beneficial relationship between search vendors and the classification and control vendors in the unstructured content space," notes analyst Brad O'Neill of the Taneja Group consultancy. "The search vendors get an OEM deal for their technology out of it and the emerging players in this space get access to a toolset that ... would be insane for the emerging classification players to build on their own."Classifier shortfalls vary. Products often can't crawl multiple HTTP servers via a Web portal, for example, but instead access server directories to conduct their searches on a host-by-host basis. So, like Scentric, they see the addition of Google as a practical way to streamline work up front.

Other players simply lack any search capabilities at all.

Mathon Systems, for example, boasts the ability to locate more than 250 metadata items in content situated on servers and NAS arrays and assemble complex audit trails. Policies can be set up to obtain data, to issue reports on it, and to control access to it. But Mathon has always relied on an external search engine to help customers search data once it's found. So far, Mathon's bundled their software with an open-source search tool, though Mathon hopes to add Google integration.

Other vendors, like Scentric, have integral search capabilities but would just as soon focus on other aspects of their wares.

"Our original decision to include our own search engine [in our product] was a time-to-market decision," says Larry Cormier, SVP of marketing at Scentric. Since then, Scentric has seen the advantage of leveraging the market penetration of Google, he notes."This is the first of several search engine integrations," says Scentric's Cormier.

Scentric, which also completed integration with EMC's Centera this week, is looking into hooking up with Microsoft as well. (See Scentric, EMC Integrate.) Redmond's enterprise search strategy was announced in May 2006 and is unfolding in its new Vista operating system, as well as in products like Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office, Windows Live Search, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for Search 2007.

Other startups share Scentric's view about searching. "Search is a well-funded technology area with many different companies offering these services," writes Richard Tso, a spokesman for Njini, in an email today. "Njinis product strategy with respect to search is to integrate with the search offerings of various vendors rather than build yet again another enterprise search engine."

Njini is talking to a range of strategic partners, but hasn't fixed on particulars yet.

Notably, it's still early days for the classification/search teaming. Among the classification vendors that have signed on with Google, only Kazeon has an integrated product available.Not everyone is interested in the matchup, either. Index Engines, for example, thinks its own search capabilities are sufficient, thank you very much. That doesn't mean the vendor isn't looking at partnerships it may find beneficial.

Indeed, there is a strong marketing reason for the pairing of search and classification. Vendors like Google have the enterprise customer base the classifiers are seeking. "For [data classifiers], connectivity to a search layer is of value, as it would be to a business intelligence software vendor," says Rob Lancaster, VP of channel development for Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). (See FAST Primps for Storage OEMs.) FAST OEMs its classification and search software to archive players such as EMC. Some view it as a competitor to Google.

"Google has the GUI that everyone in an enterprise knows," says Sudhakar Muddu, Kazeon's CEO. Offering a Kazeon/Google combination gives folk a leg up on organizing data.

Enterprise IT pros will have to determine how much the Google interface will save them when they're faced with the need to buy more than one product for data classification and search.

Some organizations won't need a Google interface. Karen Johnson, regulatory officer at Indianapolis-based Ascension Health Network, is in the process of installing StoredIQ's technology at St. Vincent Health, a hospital in the network. She neither wants nor needs to have a Google interface on her classified data. "We're using the product to identify information to restrict access," she says. "We want to find files of confidential data and move them to a very controlled environment."— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch