Will PLM unlock cloud search?

You probably remember my earlier post – PLM cloud concerns and dropbox reality for engineers. My hunch of the corporate reality – data is moving to the cloud. Against rules, procedures, security concerns and corporate policies. USB sticks provided similar data transfer transparency during the last decade. Now it happens with cloud storages. The ability of the cloud platforms such as dropbox and others to support ubiquitous collaboration and data transparency makes it practically unavoidable when you think about how to share data efficiently inside of organization and beyond.

As much as the amount of files in the dropbox accounts is growing, the question of how to simplify access to this data becomes critical. Search is one the most straightforward ways to access data. Google makes search a mainstream for many places. However, indexing data across personal data storage sounds to me as interesting opportunity these days.

I was reading semanticweb article SearchYourCloud Awarded U.S. Patent for Improved Search Engine Results. I found the writeup interesting. Companies are looking to provide a unique way to index data across cloud locations such as drobox, google drive, box.net and others. Here is my favorite passage:

Cross-Cloud Search: The technology improves the native search technology in back-office applications such as Exchange and cloud services including Box.net, Dropbox and Google Drive, delivering secure and fast cross-cloud search, providing users access to multiple cloud service accounts in one place.

I found the following feature very interesting – data de-duplication:

Data De-duplication: Prior to being displayed to the user, SearchYourCloud’s search results are de-duplicated. Redundant results are eliminated, including multiple versions of the same document to deliver only the newest and most relevant results.

What is my conclusion? People tend to create a mess by spreading out documents. Cloud data can get messy if it goes out of control. It can easy become a problem for companies. With the absence of good data management and collaboration solutions, many companies will be trying to use solutions like Dropbox, Google drive and box.net to store and share data. Cloud search solution can be an interesting approach to get some control over this data. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg