There was news on the air that Microsoft and HP is joining together for Enterprise software pack, but I didn’t expect this one. IBM and Yahoo have developed a free, entry-level, enterprise search application that some believes will seriously disrupt the low-end segment of this market where Google has been selling many of its Mini search devices. IBM and Yahoo plan to release the server-side application on Wednesday as a free download aimed at companies that haven’t tried out enterprise search due to cost and complexity concerns.

The software, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, has been designed to be simple to install and use, which can index up to 500,000 documents from more than 200 file types, like Adobe Systems’ PDF and Microsoft’s Word and Excel. With that indexing capacity, IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition poses a significant threat the Google Mini, an analyst said. The Mini is a hardware device loaded with Google search software that starts at US$1,995 for 50,000 documents and tops out at 300,000 documents in its $8,995 edition.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition isn’t comparable to more powerful mid-tier products like the Google Search Appliance, nor to high-end systems from companies like Fast Search & Transfer ASA and Autonomy. These mid-tier and high-end products have significantly more features, like the ability to index data from many more sources, like business applications. However, this IBM/Yahoo product is precisely what a lot of organization had been looking for. IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition also features an integrated Internet search tab that lets users query Yahoo’s Web search engine.

End users interact with the IBM/Yahoo product via a browser-based interface that has the look and feel of the Yahoo search engine, which is familiar to many people. Two other user interface options exist. The product’s search box can be embedded in an existing webpage, and the IT department can build its own custom interface via an application program interface. The product now becomes the entry-level option in IBM’s enterprise search line, which features the more sophisticated and fee-based OmniFind Enterprise Edition, whose functionality can be extended with OmniFind Discovery Edition.

The upgrade path to the Enterprise Edition is far from seamless right now, requiring a re-crawling of the documents to rebuild the index, but IBM plans to make the process smoother in the future, said Marc Andrews, IBM’s program director of information management strategies. IBM also offers customers the option of purchasing guaranteed phone technical support for $2,000 per server per year, he said.

As far as I have seen Yahoo relevancy search is a crap compare to Google but still since price is low, it poses a threat to Google Mini. Question is now what would be Google’s answer to it?

[tags]Enterprise search, Google Mini, Server side application,IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition[/tags]