TMCnet News

Google beats business
[January 24, 2006]

Google beats business


(Business, The (London) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jan. 22--Google is to reveal that the adoption of Google Enterprise search engines by corporate customers is growing at a faster rate than rival offerings.

While Google is best-known for its free online search engine, the internet giant is attempting to become a player in the lucrative markets for business computing. Google Enterprise, the arm of the company that sells business search engines, says it has more than 2,000 customers. This makes it tiny compared to corporate IT players like Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Oracle.



But although Google lags behind its rivals in terms of units sold, a source close to the company says the growth rate of sales of its corporate search equipment is greater than expected. The figures will be released as early as this week.

The company is launching two new versions of the Google Mini, the search computer aimed at smaller companies. The new Minis can index and search up to 300,000 internal documents, as opposed to the original Mini, launched a year ago, which could only index 100,000. The old Mini is priced at 1,995 (E2,913, $3,531).


The Mini range harnesses Google's search software to help firms cope with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley in the US that require companies there and anyone doing business with them to be able to produce any business document. The market for this type of equipment is estimated to be worth at least $1bn in 2006.

Google thinks business users used to finding whatever they want in a couple of mouse clicks on the web will expect the same service when searching company information. Google provides back-office search computers for Morgan Stanley, the British Library and the United Nations.

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