Search Startup Seeks to Be Google for IT

Paglo launches a public beta of a search engine that lets IT staffers easily find information about their networks.

Paglo, a startup with designs on carving its own niche in the enterprise search market, is testing a search engine designed to help IT personnel keep abreast of their companies computer, network and security systems. The platform, launching Nov. 19, lets users find out such details as whether their machines have the latest security patches or how many iPhones are being used on their network.
The Paglo search engine, which the company is billing as "Google for IT," is an answer to computer systems that become increasingly complex. As successful companies scale, they acquire more hardware devices, software programs and other technologies over time. The glut of IT gear can be daunting to navigate even for the administrators who set it up and install it, said Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff. To help keep track of their systems, administrators have traditionally used cataloging systems for each area of IT management, but these can be unwieldy because they keep information locked up. Paglo makes all of the information about IT environments immediately accessible, said de Haaff, adding, "We want to take all of the IT data, put it into a big pot and give people the ability to use search to answer just about any IT question." The platform includes the Paglo Crawler, an open-source discovery spider that businesses download on one computer to gather IT information from all devices and software in an environment. This software can be extended with plug-ins to cull data from additional data sources. Microsoft unveils free enterprise search software. Click here to read more. When users do searches, the Paglo Search Index returns text and rich quantitative data results. Paglo users access their IT information through a customizable Paglo Dashboard, which presents results from their saved queries. Users can create separate dashboards to view operations, network management and security assets. These views can be saved to the Paglo community for anyone to use. De Haaff said the Paglo search engine is, and always will be, free; the Palo Alto, Calif., company plans to eventually make money by selling value-added products and services in the future. The founders have not determined what those services might be. Paglo might be new, but its not a first in the industry. San Francisco-based Splunk, which has been providing IT search for a few years, boasts 450 customers, including Yahoo, British Telecom and Dow Jones. De Haaff, who along with Chief Technology Officer Chris Waters created Paglo in July 2007 after selling Network Chemistrys wireless security business to Aruba Networks, said Splunk is limited to logs while Paglo collects "all" of the information about the computers, networks and users. Also, Paglo is free; Splunk isnt. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, views and analysis on enterprise search technology.