Oracle VP Robert Shrimp on Enterprise Search

garzpacho writes "BusinessWeek interviews Robert Shrimp on the enterprise search market. Shrimp talks about about the importance of corporate search, addresses what some claim is Oracle's lateness to the arena and takes a few shots at competitors: 'Our main competition is the filing cabinet...The manila file folder is the ultimate enemy.'"

Comments

Like Lifestreams?

[Keen Anthony]

It's interesting that Shimp says Oracle's main competition is the file cabinet. I wonder if he's just being figurative, or if he sees Oracle as steering us away from the desktop metaphor and its information management problems, and moving toward something instantly contextual like David Gelernter's Lifestreams where information is queried as a contextual, time-ordered stream using filters. Hopefully, it'll be more than just simply indexing labels and keywords.

Not surprising, really.

[WidescreenFreak]

This isn't that much of a surprise that he considers the manilla envelope/folder to be the enemy. One of Oracle's strengths has always been as a data warehouse. From their perspective, any data that's stored in on envelopre or folder is something that can be archived digitally. Of course, archiving digitally, and thus becoming the "paperless" office that many tout but never implement, means revenue dollars for Oracle. After all, something has to archive all of that data. The more people who store their data in folders and envelopes, the less likely Oracle is to sell to that company as a data warehouse solution. So, naturally a folder or envelope is a threat to their business model.

And once that data is archived, a searching function to quickly (if not sooner) go through and accurately return the document that it thinks you're looking for is absolutely critical. I can't imagine a more problematic scene for an IT shop than to have the users come back and say, "Well, that's great. But how do I find what I want now?" (And I'm not talking about the "Which key is the Any key?" users.) I've seen the ability (or rather inability) to do an accurate search become a majorheadache for many imaging and data warehouse installs.