The clients that I know who succeed with customer relationship management applications succeed because they realize that these systems are no more than glorified databases.

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"We started enterprise search with the ability to search a company's Intranet, then added the ability to go into databases, collaboration systems, and applications, now this, " said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google enterprise search.

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Rob Gardos, chief executive of GridApp Systems, a company that helps automate the deployment, configuration and management of databases, says that one large data center he encountered took 18 months to fully install an Oracle quarterly security patch across the enterprise.

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