Enterprise search vendor Vivisimo today released a mobile tool allowing users to access and search corporate intranets, e-mail and other applications from devices such as BlackBerries and PDAs.

Vivisimo’s Velocity for Mobile product attempts to overcome the shortcomings of mobile user interfaces by clustering results into categories such as call center data, white papers, marketing and sales materials, or resumes, just as its full enterprise search tool does. The mobile software also lets users navigate search results by repository, so they can look at results just from an e-mail server, or an application such as EMC Documentum’s content management tool or Microsoft SharePoint.

“It’s really providing a lot of navigation capabilities after you do the search, so you can really quickly drill down” to the information you need, says Jerome Pesenti, chief scientist and co-founder of the company.

Customers also can configure the mobile search tool so it highlights information people are likely to need when they are on the go, such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses in accounts listed in Salesforce.com.

Velocity for Mobile is available as an extension to the Velocity enterprise solution. The average Vivisimo customer pays about $225,000 for the enterprise search software, and the mobile extension will cost 20% of the overall license fee, according to Rebecca Thompson, marketing vice president.

Enterprise search products for mobile devices are nothing new, says Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Google and Motorola teamed up to provide enterprise search on mobile devices, while FAST, Teragram and SAP have each done the same thing, he says.

Enterprise search on mobile devices will eventually become widely used, but today it’s a small market because customers and vendors are more concerned about solving the problems that plague search tools used on desktop computers and laptops, Brown says.

“The bigger issue that’s holding back the broad adoption of search on mobile devices is more an issue of getting search working internally first,” he says. “The afterthought is the mobility piece.”