OneBox for all your corporate information

Posted by Dave Girouard, VP, Enterprise

We added OneBox functionality to our Google Search Appliance today, which means you can now find just about anything through your friendly Google search box. Lots of folks have been asking us - is this going to kill the corporate portal market? For the record, we have no desire or plans to kill anything. But it's clear to us that people prefer search to having every possible piece of information thrust at them willy-nilly. And they like having search front and center on their screens, not buried, as it is all too often inside company intranets. As industry-watcher John Battelle explains, search is so powerful because it responds to an expressed intent by the user. Shouldn't corporate portals do the same?

Google OneBox for Enterprise is cool because it takes a completely understood and tested design metaphor and extends it to another domain. Um, what I meant to say was, employees already know how to get movie listings, weather forecasts, and flight information through simple Google queries. So it won't surprise them (in fact it may delight them) to learn that they can get real-time contact info, sales forecasts, and customer information the very same way. We launched an initial set of OneBox modules with Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com; some of these partners talk about that here.

And there’s one more thing. We're also introducing an all-new Mini that's 25 times faster and half the size of its predecessor!