[ISN] Oracle on track of secure search

[InfoSec News]

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18341811%5E15841%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

Bloomberg
MARCH 07, 2006 

ORACLE, the world's third- biggest software maker, has begun selling
software that allows users to search only personal data on their work
computers such as email, word documents and calendar appointments.

Chief executive Larry Ellison says the California company's new search
program "is one of the biggest products in years," and may help draw
users away from Google, which also offers software for searching
content on computers and operates the world's most-used internet
search site.

"Google has always had a good search, but it was the security side
that it's not good at," Ellison told reporters at the annual Oracle
OpenWorld Tokyo 2006 conference in Japan.

"We have the security problem solved. That's what we're good at, and
that's the hard part of the problem."

The business-oriented Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, which the
company began offering worldwide today, uses a crawler that
categorises what files a user can or cannot access depending on its
security policies.

To run the search, the user needs a password, and the results are
tailored to the specific user's security settings.

The software is downloadable for a free trial, Oracle Japan public
relations director Takeo Tamagawa says. He declines to comment on how
much the software will cost. "No one yet has done a good job of
securely searching private data, even though private data is the most
valuable.

"Most people want to search private data much more often than they
need to search public data," Ellison says.

Ellison says he is also striving to make Oracle the top software maker
for business systems through its "global strategy of innovation and
acquisition."

"In software, the more customers you have for a product, the more you
can invest in research and development to make that product better,"  
he says. "The top position is critical in allowing you to invest in
engineering and continue to improve and innovate."

After the $US10.6 billion takeover of PeopleSoft in January 2005,
Oracle is now the world's biggest maker of software for handling
payrolls and other human resource tasks, he says.

The January 31 acquisition of California-based Siebel Systems also
makes Oracle "a world leader" in customer relationship management,
Ellison says.

In enterprise resource planning software, which provides applications
to help business manage product planning, parts purchasing and
inventory management, Oracle is second, behind Germany's SAP, he says.