Google’s Search Appliance, the company’s first business-focused product introduced in 2002, is being put out to pasture.
The tech giant told its reseller and consulting partners the news via email on Thursday, noting that they can continue to sell one-year license renewals for existing hardware customers through 2017, but that they will be unable to sell new hardware. Renewals will end in 2018, according to a copy of the email viewed by Fortune.
Google will continue to issue bug fixes, security updates, and technical support as long as license agreements are valid, which could be through 2019 in some cases.
According to a post by Perficient, a Google partner:
Google has decided to sunset the hardware-based Google Search Appliance (GSA) and focus their engineering efforts on cloud-based solutions. The GSA will remain supported for the next three years, giving you plenty of time to evaluate the future of your enterprise search investment and continue to deliver value to your business
Fortune contacted Google for comment and will update this story if a response is provided.
Google means business when it comes to cloud
Google’s (GOOG) appliance was intended for companies that want to use Google technology to search internal documents by author name, prices, dates, and other data. Google’s partners made money by integrating the appliance’s search with customer document archives, applications, and websites.
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Another long-time Google Enterprise partner that got the notice said the writing may have been on the wall: Google already phased out one model of the appliance three years ago.
This move could be a sign that Diane Greene, who was named senior vice president of Google’s enterprise unit in November, is setting priorities as the company prepares to push Google cloud more aggressively, as company CEO Sundar Pichai indicated on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call this week.
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Per the Google notification, the company said it is working on a new cloud-based product which is now in limited beta.
