Google, Kazeon Team Up to Offer Power-Search Appliances

Anyone working in IT in a corporate enterprise has at some point in their career gotten that dreaded phone call: "The Senior VP of whatever needs to find a document he was using six months ago. And he needs it yesterday." And although having to find documents and data might not always be that stressful, it's an ongoing task in most corporate environments, and one that gets progressively more difficult as the corporate data store grows.

That was the reasoning behind the release in April of Google OneBox for Enterprise, a new high-end version of the Google Search Appliance that integrates technology from partners such as Cisco Systems, Cognos, Employease, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAS into an appliance that can search and deliver information from a wide variety of enterprise business sources. The $30,000 entry price for the Google Search Appliance with OneBox for Enterprise hasn't been an issue with enterprise market buyers, who were in desperate need of good search tools for their enterprise.

Last Wednesday, storage information management vendor Kazeon announced the first results of its partnership with Google: the integration of Kazeon's enterprise search and indexing IS1200 server with Google OneBox for Enterprise. This isn't an inexpensive addition to the Google appliance; adding the Kazeon appliance to the OneBox environment will set buyers back another $40,000 (or existing Kazeon customers will need to spend the $30,000 for the Google appliance).

For customers who wonder what Kazeon brings to the table at that price tag, the product's benefits include the ability to search archives, disk-to-disk backups, and other previously unsupported file types, according to Google Enterprise Partner program manager Kevin Smith. The Kazeon appliance can recognize and index data from more than 370 different file types, including .zip formats and email containers residing on Windows, UNIX, or Linux servers, NAS appliances, and EMC Centera storage hardware. This capability gets added to the OneBox search and indexing capabilities, which include the recently announced ability to report on real-time data in many business intelligence (BI) systems, ERP, and customer relationship management (CRM) products. Kazeon is also positioning the combined products as the best way to let users easily retrieve sensitive data, comply with legal requests for documents, and comply with businesses' regulatory requirements.

One of the advantages that the combined product offers is its simple Web interface that lets users perform searches--either the Google-style interface users are accustomed to or Kazeon's own straightforward Web interface. Both the Kazeon and Google appliances process a search request, and the user sees the combined results in a single interface. These product combinations let corporate users quickly locate relevant data from among the millions, if not billions, of files that are stored in locations scattered across large corporate enterprises.