FinanceTech recently had an article titled Federated Search Providers Are Looking to Reach the Financial Services Industry. In the article two vendors were highlighted, Deep Web Technologies and BrightPlanet. Both these firms have interesting technologies whose goal is to provide federated search capabilites across external and internal information. The article correctly points out the challenge of searching across internal information in a financial institution:
Pittsburgh-based Mellon Financial Corp., for example, has been hesitant to adopt an enterprisewide search solution to mine the firm's data stores, according to Ed Cymbalak, VP and application architect in the distributed systems group at Mellon. "Because of the breadth of businesses that we have, the number of people that would be allowed to actually look across all of those data sets would be very limited," he reasons.
The article fails to mention the difficulty in being able to search across numerous premium databases in a federated manner, a challenge that Alacra has been working on for 10 years and has solved for many large financial institutions. The ability to set permission to databases to the desktop level, to track usage of different databases to the desktop or the project and to bring back search results based on firm-wide preferences are all keys to effective federated searching at a financial institution. So while from 30,000 feet new technologies may hold promise in solving a particular problem, it's working closely with customers and prospects and getting into the details that really makes a successful deployment.
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