Enterprise applications, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) are the kinds of application that have put the RDBMS vendor at the centre of the corporate technology universe for a number of years. That’s all about to change, as vendors of Enterprise Search platforms offer organisations new ways to extend the reach and range of these important applications.

With organisations demanding increased business agility and employee flexibility and business in the twenty-first century heavily reliant on information processing systems, organisations must be adept at managing and exploiting corporate data in all its forms. These range from the structured information held within packaged and bespoke enterprise applications to the unstructured content stored within file servers, e-mail systems, collaboration platforms, and corporate portals.

Weaving together multiple transactional and operational information types is no easy matter, and delivering this composite view of the business to the information worker in a timely fashion and in a useful format continues to present a real challenge.

This notion of ‘pervasive BI’ has recently started to evolve into the formation of a promising BI-based packaged applications market. However, the cost of development and deployment, combined with the time-to-value and the performance/scalability of such systems, still presents some very challenging issues. It is against this backdrop that Exalead developed CloudView: an information access platform that collects data in any format from any source, and automatically transforms it into a cohesive, meaningful information resource.