Worldwide Enterprise Search Market to Reach $1.2 Billion by 2010
7 February, 2008 By Vanessa Ho
A recent Gartner Inc. report has forecasted that the worldwide enterprise search market will surpass $1.2 billion by 2010 led by the need for organizations to access content within and outside their organization in a faster and more relevant manner.
"There is more and more content we have to search through and how can we make access to that content easier and provide relevancy in terms of the actual content," said Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner. "If I do a web search, I can come back with hundreds of thousands of hits and I have to weed through all of that content to find out the key data sources that I need."
He added that the different repositories and sources of information is expanding at a fairly fast rate that now include different media types that goes beyond word documents but include rich media like audio. "[Enterprise search software] cuts through the noise and provides core data that you need in a richer and quicker way."
Eid said that barriers to the adoption of enterprise search software has been defining an ROI on the technology as most companies might just ask their employee's to do their search on a free search engine like Google or use their desktop search tool instead of spending the money on deploying and managing their own search technology.
"But what is the value of somebody's time and frustration level to find the right information in a more effective way," he added. Eid noted that the enterprise search market is an area where some of the larger vendors don't play in yet and is mostly comprised of smaller vendors that have to compete against free search engines for market share. He listed Autonomy, Fast Search and Transfer, Google and IBM as some of the leading vendors in the enterprise search market space.
"[Enterprise search software] is a market aligned to smaller vendors that do a very good job but don't have the marquee names like other software markets."
He also noted a revitalization of the market is occurring because the next generation of the technology is offering better analytics to improve the search experience, which is driving better usage. As well, Eid said that merger and acquisition activity from current enterprise search vendors and larger vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, is expected to continue in order for them to gain entry into this space. "[It's going to be] a billion dollar [business], which is a nice size to participate in as a vendor," said Eid.
The report, entitled "Dataquest Insight: Technology and Vendor Consolidation Will Drive the Enterprise Search Market Through 2012," also noted that worldwide enterprise search software revenue will total $989.7 million in 2008, up 15 per cent from $860.6 million in 2007.
