Google partners with BearingPoint

Google is teaming up with consultancy and systems integrator BearingPoint to peddle Google enterprise search products bundled with BearingPoint services, the vendors plan to announce on Tuesday.

As Google attempts to increase its credibility as a provider of enterprise IT products, this represents its most significant partnership to date with a large IT services provider.

Google is widely seen in the industry as a provider of low-end enterprise search systems whose primary appeal is that they are simple to use, to set up and to maintain, and are generally less expensive than offerings from competing vendors such as Autonomy, Verity, and Fast Search & Transfer.

But Google has higher aspirations for its enterprise search products, and it needs to complement those products with high-quality IT services if it hopes to compete head-to-head against Autonomy, Verity, Fast and others, industry analysts have said in the past.

Conceptually, enterprise search platforms are supposed to index data that an organization has stored in multiple and disparate databases and applications and make it searchable from a single user interface.

BearingPoint’s decision to build a new enterprise search practice around Google’s products is a bet on the products’ ease of use and effectiveness versus what it considers a more complicated approach from other vendors, even if many industry analysts view competing products as more powerful and sophisticated.

“Traditional enterprise search platforms are very expensive and cumbersome to implement [for IT departments.] They also don’t satisfy end user requirements, so they have a low adoption rate,” said Chris Weitz, managing director of BearingPoint’s newly formed Search Solutions practice group, located in Mountain View, California, where Google’s headquarters are.

“The Google model is the right one,” he said.

With integration services and application plug-ins, BearingPoint will tailor deployments of Google enterprise search products to vertical industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services. It has also built extensions for specific third-party data stores and enterprise applications.

Although the partnership isn’t exclusive, Google and BearingPoint have invested considerable resources and efforts in the alliance and are each other’s preferred partner in enterprise search, said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s enterprise unit.

Google’s main enterprise search product is its Search Appliance, a hardware device loaded with Google search engine software that organizations use to index and find information stored on their internal servers.

It also has a scaled-down and less expensive version of the Search Appliance called Google Mini, as well as an enterprise desktop search application and a line of Google Earth mapping products for businesses.

Scott Klein, vice president of Web site and technology at weekly magazine The Nation in New York, understands the logic behind the BearingPoint partnership.

However, he foresees needing no outside help of that sort with the company’s Google Mini due to the product’s inherent simplicity and ease of use.

It took him only three days to set up and deploy it, although he did some optional but technically complex configuration work to it, he said. “It was dead simple to set up,” he said.

The device, acquired in December 2004, powers the magazine’s public Web site. “We’re ecstatic with the Mini,” Klein said.

Mark Trammell, Web administrator at the University of Florida in Gainsville, feels similarly. The university has used a Search Appliance to index its thousands of Web servers for about three years, and maintaining it and scaling it has been a very smooth process along the way.

“It was fairly easy to implement so I’m not certain where BearingPoint would add any value to our implementation,” Trammell said, adding that he remains receptive to learning more about the new services.