Adding Search To Enterprise Apps

Knowledge management has become a key component that companies look for in a variety of enterprise applications. Recognizing this trend, Verity Inc. last week introduced an integration package that will let software vendors and in-house developers add search, categorization, and personalization technologies to their products.

Verity's 200 original equipment manufacturer customers use the Verity Developer Kernel to embed simple keyword searches into applications ranging from E-commerce to content-management systems. But the newest version of its K2 Developer platform will let software developers integrate all of the capabilities of Verity's K2 knowledge-management platform, says chief technology officer Prabhakar Raghavan.

In the past, search engines have been difficult to integrate into third-party applications, says Michael Harris, senior VP of products and strategies for content-management company FileNet Corp. By year's end, FileNet will replace the search technology embedded in its content-management application, Hummingbird Ltd.'s Fulcrum, with Verity's search capabilities.

FileNet's customers want personalization and categorization capabilities so their search tools can yield the results people want on the first go-round. For instance, manufacturers want employees to be able to quickly find the right CAD drawing within thousands of pages of documentation. K2 Developer will let FileNet offer a more complete set of integrated search components to meet such demands.

Bell Globemedia Interactive, a Toronto media firm, had been using Virage Inc.'s video-indexing tool, which uses AltaVista Co. search technology, in addition to Verity for text searching. The complexity of using two search engines prevented the company from offering video search capabilities on its Web site. Now, Bell is deploying an integrated Verity-Virage search engine that will let site visitors and employees search its video and text archives through one interface.