Enterprise Search: Dave Girouard on Taking Google to the Corporation - ' Getting to Know CIOs '

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CIO INSIGHT: What can Google do for the enterprise?
GIROUARD: The enterprise is obviously not where Google began, but the company was founded in 1998 with some very ambitious goals to organize the world's information. That was really the substance of Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]'s goal when they started the company, and it explains a lot of the things Google does. You know, organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The enterprise is a subset of that. Information access is a big problem in the enterprise. It affects hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis and it's a thorny problem. We think it's one that Google is uniquely qualified to solve. We don't see ourselves as a Web-search company. We don't see ourselves as a consumer company. We see ourselves as an information company.

What Google really needed to do over the past few years was build an organization, and a set of capabilities, so we could go after this enterprise part of the problem. We're able to tap into a lot of the core intellectual property and capabilities of Google, but we also had to develop a lot of new capabilities to channel that expertise into the enterprise.

So have you been meeting with CIOs to gain the knowledge that you needed to address this market?
Well, like a lot of things at Google, we started out very small. We got something into the market very quickly that could provide us with an incredible amount of feedback in a short period of time. That's what we did back in 2002 with the first version of the Google search appliance.

It essentially packaged our Web-search technologies into a box that could be deployed inside a company and provide a Google-like search capability over corporate context. And that was done with a handful of engineers and a few salespeople. A very small amount of resources. That's usually how we start anything.

At a general level, we aren't huge on market research. We believe in getting something out there, talking to customers about what it does and doesn't do for them, and about what would solve their problems at a bigger level.

So we do talk to CIOs every day, and we are very much driven by the needs of the enterprise market. But having said that, what's unique about us, I think, is we're really tapping into the pace of innovation that's happening on the consumer side. That's where I think there's a huge opportunity for us. We want to leverage innovation happening on the consumer side that is end-user focused and channel that in a pragmatic way into enterprise technology.

So what did you learn from the search appliance about the way that data is handled and searched and collated in the enterprise environment?
Well, we learned that people know how to use Google, and they like it. When you put Google inside a company, almost invariably the reaction from the employee base is exceedingly positive. There's almost a sigh of relief that now they'll be able to find their information. For us, that is always the most important thing—how well does it solve the problem for the end-user.

And then, along the way, we've had to learn how to make a product that fits into an enterprise environment and works not just for the end-user but also for the IT organization. So there are different constituencies that you have to think about when you deliver products to the enterprise. We naturally came in with this inclination to focus first on the end-user. That comes really from Larry and Sergey. But we have to bring the sensibility that there are other constituencies involved here.

Did CIOs provide any feedback or concerns?
The questions were mostly about how comprehensive is the product. Questions like: "How much can it solve the big problem for us, versus a small subset of the problem?" It was a limited product, and it could only address a certain subset of the information that needed to be searched. So we needed to add the ability to search across database content or search across secure content. And that's really what we've been driving toward for a few years now, making a product that can become the fundamental search application for very big companies.

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