May 13, 2005

As B2B portals continue to gain popularity within enterprises, it's important to remind us that no portal is really complete without capable search functionalities.

This is especially true in the high-information environments in which search specialist FAST plays. "There's been more information produced in the last two years than in all of previous history," says Silvjia Seres, senior director of corporate development for FAST. "Enterprises have terabytes and terabytes of data."

That data sits in plenty of different systems: enterprise resource planning (ERP), document management, legacy systems, customer relationship management (CRM), &c.

The portal is your window to this data, but you still need a good telescope to find what you're seeking, says Seres. "Whenever you provide access to information in one place, you can have a search box that FAST powers."

Over the years, search has gone from being a consumer utility for Web surfers to an enterprise-class e-business component. "If you have an intranet, companies want to make sure that collaboration is enabled though information sharing," says Seres by way of example. "You want to limit the duplication of data."

The takeaway insight is that enterprise search is comparable to services-based technology; just as you want to create and reuse services, you also want to reuse, rather than hunt for or recreat, key enterprise information. It's all part of a physically and conceptually economical approach to e-business.

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