With the sunsetting of its Google Search Appliance, Google has signaled its intent to focus its engineering efforts on its own cloud, targeting web and Google Apps content. The question is, has it forgotten the rest of the enterprise?

The future of enterprise search is all about cloud – for many reasons (scalability, security, efficiency, innovation), and for Google it’s obviously the entire strategy. For Coveo, while we announced last year the first end-to-end search as a service platform along with machine-learning capabilities, and we’ve been offering search as a cloud service for several years, we also believe that companies will continue to leverage on-premise information alongside cloud content for a long while. That’s why we unify on-premise and cloud data (via cloud-based indexing), and present it in any system, cloud or on-premise. Because people just want the best information, every time and everywhere, regardless of where it exists.

This approach is not easy nor simple to create, however we are making it easy to activate and use. Enterprise search is unlike a traditional “Google search” on the Internet. The technology must adhere to highly complex security schemas for each and every system indexed, and it must unify and augment the information to make it “searchable” – in addition to understanding the context of the individual, etc.

Even using the word “searchable” is a bit misleading when we consider what is possible with intelligent search in the cloud. More and more, Coveo intelligent search simply shows people what they need to succeed…like a virtual digital assistant. Gartner calls this “Insight Engines.”

Coveo has been doing this in the Salesforce ecosystem for several years. Our technology unifies content from both Salesforce and external sources, such as File Share, Jive, Atlassian Confluence. It simply shows the support agent, for example in Salesforce Service Cloud, what will solve the case he or she is working on, regardless of the source. On the Salesforce Community Cloud, we’ve added a machine learning, self-tuning service with Coveo Machine-Learning, which uses the community’s behavior to learn and tune for the best outcomes, like self-service success. As a customer is searching and navigating in the community, Coveo simply shows them what will help. Queries are no longer necessary, as the technology now understands intent.

Most CIOs of mid- to large-size companies want to continue to leverage all of their systems. Quite often they will use this type of intelligent search as the bridge between on-premise and cloud-based data as they transform their businesses to digital workplaces.

Intelligent search helps them better digitally engage customers and upskill employees, because it is:

  1. Responsive – relevant to all questions and contexts
  2. Proactive – suggesting relevant content and people
  3. Predictive – recommending what will help the individual succeed – using machine learning and analytics to understand behavior and context and self-tune – and simply show that as people work and interact.

Goodbye GSA, and hello to intelligent search in the cloud that simply presents the best information, every time and everywhere – regardless of where it exists.

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