IT Week: As product manager for Google in Europe, can you explain what your company brings to enterprise search systems?

Arvind Desikan: A huge amount of data resides behind the corporate firewall, so this falls squarely within our mission [to organise information], and we do have some big-name customers. Employees often struggle to find information in the enterprise and take a huge productivity hit doing this. Meanwhile, the volume of information is growing exponentially, and is increasingly siloed. We make it easier for employees and customers of companies [to search], and from an IT point of view [we make search systems] easier to deploy, and we deliver relevant results. We can also cater for a huge range of organisations.

How do you respond to critics who say Google's technology is not tailored enough to firms' needs?

Our competitors think we offer a simplistic approach, but our enterprise search engine leverages the experience we've built up searching millions of web sites and brings this to [large corporates]. We do offer plug-and-play solutions and believe that a large number of customers will benefit from the generic approach. If a customer has specific requirements or legacy systems that they want to be connected [so the data residing there can be searched], then the Google Enterprise Partnership [GEP] scheme is the way they can do it. But a huge percentage can benefit from the Google Search Appliance and deploy it right away.

What is the GEP?

It's a professional partner programme where [we work] with organisations which specialise in extending search, and have expertise in a certain type of deployment or industry. We have about 50 GEP partners and with this initiative we are hoping to reach a much wider range of firms and customise solutions to their needs.

What is role of the IT department in enterprise search?

This is where we're most different to other solutions. The time and effort required to implement our technology is very small, and it is compatible with firms' single sign-on capabilities. IT administrators can also write interfaces to link [their Google search appliance] to other content management systems, because we've provided content-feed APIs. We save IT managers the pain of having to tweak and install complicated systems. Their job is not to tweak search technology but to manage IT systems across the enterprise.

Where do you see the future of search tools in the enterprise?

Enterprise search is not the most effective traditionally, but expectations have certainly risen, [in part] thanks to us. We'll continue to find ways to make search more effective, because there are huge productivity gains and revenue benefits to be had. There are several different approaches to search, and time will tell which [is best] but we believe in absolute simplicity, even though a lot of complicated things are going on at the back-end.

About Arvind Desikan

Arvind Desikan is product marketing manager in Europe for Google's partner products.

Desikan previously worked at Applied Materials, the world's largest producer of semiconductor kit, in marketing and product management roles.