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IBM Develops Corporate Search Technology

Posted on: Sunday, 27 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

Jun. 27--In the red-hot market for search technology, IBM hopes to do for corporate data what search engines like Google have done for the Web.

IBM has developed new software that searches corporate networks, desktop computers, company Intranets and the Internet to extract information. It can find information in databases, spreadsheets, Word documents, newsgroups, e-mail messages, audio files and images, and Web sites, for example.

Big Blue calls the technology "Masala" -- a reference to the blend of Indian spices, evoking its ability to blend different information.

The new search technology -- developed at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab and Almaden Research Center, both in San Jose -- is part of the next version of IBM's corporate database due out later this year, called DB2 Information Integrator.

The technology is still being tested, but it has the potential to improve the way large organizations access information. It can index and locate documents from many different sources and update the index as soon as the content changes.

That means an employee in San Jose could go to her company's Web portal and type "plasma TV" for example, into the search box. With the click of a button, this single query will go out to all computers in the company's network, as well as other sources. Among the matches it could return is a technical paper on "plasma TVs" stored by a colleague at the company's Tokyo office, a "plasma TV" customer list from a manager's desktop in New York and a 2003 company press release on the Internet.

In the medical field, search technology could help doctors retrieve all the data on an emergency room patient, such as blood tests, x-rays or medical records, in a single search from any location.

With the explosion of electronic information, companies are collecting data at mind-boggling rates, but unlike Web surfers, they have no easy way to find what they have.

"Everybody has a problem. You have things in spreadsheets, Word documents, reports that you wrote. You are thinking where did I put that document?" said Nelson Mattos, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and director of information integration. Mattos helped develop the Masala technology in IBM's Silicon Valley research lab from work that began there in the early 1990's.

"Think about the amount of money companies are spending because employees are looking for information and not finding it, and the impact on productivity," he said.

IBM isn't the only company working feverishly to address this issue. Microsoft and Google are both developing software that lets people easily search for information stored on their computer hard drives.

IBM says its technology goes beyond that because it lets an entire organization have access to every desktop in the organization.

Big Blue's 300,000 employees are testing Masala search through the company's internal Web site.

So far, IBM has the most comprehensive solution to the problem of searching disparate sources and formats, said Dana Gardner, senior analyst at the Yankee Group in Boston.

"I can go out on the Web using Google or Yahoo or MSN and find information pretty quickly and comprehensively," Gardner said. "That's something I haven't been able to do on my hard drive or my corporate network or the company Intranet."

One reason is because Web pages are built using a standard approach called HTML -- or Hypertext Markup Language. No such standard exists to unify the mish-mash of internal documents.

At Mazda's North American headquarters in Irvine, the Masala technology helps the company's different systems share information, giving managers up-to-the-minute data on car sales at 700 dealerships across the country, said Joe Neria, Mazda's IT consultant.

"The hardest part is that our data is in different formats," Neria said. "You need a product that is going to make it look like one format."

Such technology isn't cheap. Putting the system into place cost Mazda about $80,000, Neria said.

While consumer search engines are grabbing the headlines, corporate search is quietly developing into an equally powerful tool, said Jeff Jones, director of strategy at IBM's Silicon Valley research lab.

"It takes much of the mystery, complexity and confusion out of the information world."

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