Microsoft Girds for Google Enterprise-Search Battle

Microsoft executives have been beating their chests and talking a big game about repelling Google’s foray into enterprise search.

Earlier in the week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said search represented one of Microsoft’s highest priorities for investment. He pointed out that the enterprise search market is worth more than $13 billion, and that Microsoft had enlisted 35 business partners to help dominate it. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner has echoed and amplified Ballmer’s message — and who thought that was possible? — telling about 7,000 attendees at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston that, “Enterprise search is our business, it’s our house and Google is not going to take that business.”

He also said the following: “Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate, because that is what they are intending to do.”

He’s right, you know. That’s exactly what Google intends to do. Maybe it’s the lack of concerted competition in the past, but Microsoft executives sound downright churlish and indignant when they come up against competitive threats, which, after all, are what markets and customer choice tend to spawn.

Just as it’s Google’s prerogative to storm of the bastions of enterprise search, it’s Microsoft’s right to respond. What’s at issue is whether Microsoft can respond effectively. Not enough is known at this point about Microsoft’s plans to counter Google’s enterprise-search push. We know that the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance are out there, and that they would seem to represent attractive form factors and prices for enterprises, and they’re now loaded with search capabilities across Cognos, Oracle, SAS, Salesforce.com, and other applications.

Can Microsoft offer a similar solution? Will it attract hardware partners such as HP to provide the boxes for a search appliance? Can it get other software vendors, including its competitors, to allow Microsoft’s enterprise-search products to extend functionality to their applications and databases?

Microsoft is barking mad — and angry, too — about Google’s incursion into the domain of enterprise search. Talk alone, though,won’t get it done. Microsoft must have a detailed plan, and it must execute on it.