IBM, in cooperation with Yahoo, has released a new update to IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition — a free search platform for enterprise use. IBM’s latest search update comes hard on the heels of Microsoft’s unveiling of Search Server 2008 Express, a rival offering that will likewise be made available for free when it launches in the first half of 2008.
“The timing of IBM’s latest announcement is not at all coincidental,” noted Jim Murphy, research director at AMR Research. “They want to remind people that Omnifind is already available for download” as well as differentiate its qualities from what Microsoft expects to offer, Murphy explained.
Omnifind enables knowledge workers to search Web sites and local or remote file systems at rates of up to 500,000 documents per instance, as well as separate content into different searchable document collections. Support is on tap for detecting and removing “near-duplicates” from search results.
Big Blue vs. Microsoft
One obvious question is how Microsoft and IBM expect to generate revenue from the launch of free utilities. “Clearly, both expect to garner revenue through upselling,” Murphy noted.
In Microsoft’s case, the upgrade would be to the full version of Microsoft Search Server (MSS) first, and then to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, he said. “In IBM’s case, it’s an Omnifind Enterprise product and service, including the higher scaling Omnifind Enterprise Edition, the natural language-based Omnifind Discovery Edition, and services for text mining and data analysis called Information Insight Offerings.”
Microsoft often receives a good deal of criticism about its conception of “free” because its products often presume existing investments in Microsoft software, including SQL Server, Exchange, or Office. With Search Server Express 2008, however, “Microsoft has extracted the enterprise-class search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and made them available” as an independent, stand-alone server “that includes an instance…