The enterprise search market is going through a major change. Until recently, search in the enterprise was an embedded capability of most applications, but companies were not investing a lot to leverage search capabilities across the enterprise. And enterprise search solutions were only available from a few niche vendors, such as Verity, Autonomy and FAST.
Sue Feldman at IDC had the total market size estimated at only $760 million a year ago. With Verity now part of Autonomy, this means that nearly half of the market was being driven by two fairly small vendors. However, the recent entrance and focus from some of the major platform vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, along with Google's foray into the space, is set to radically change the landscape. Sue Feldman believes the market will grow at around 25% and spending will quickly surpass $1 billion.
This is already starting to have a major impact on the capabilities that are becoming available to companies and their purchasing behavior. But it will take a little time for this to show up in analyst market reports and market share numbers. For example, last week, Forrester released the Forrester Wave for Enterprise Search Platforms, and still shows FAST and Autonomy as the number 1 and 2 vendors, with IBM and Google at number 4 and 5 respectively, Microsoft barely visible, and Oracle and SAP not even having offerings in time to participate (Endeca, a company focused more on business specific search solutions rather than enterprise search infrastructure shows up as number 3).
This is probably a fair assessment, given that offerings from the platform vendors are new and still maturing. However, remember what happened in the Portal market. There were a few major independent portal vendors, and a bunch of small ones. It was a very fragmented market, with none of the platform vendors in the leader quadrant. Then, the platform vendors entered the space, and now look who the leading portal providers are - IBM, SAP, BEA, Oracle and Microsoft.
Well, look for the same thing to happen in the search market. As these companies begin committing themselves to the market, they will be able to provide more robust solutions that provide better integration with companies' existing technology infrastructure. The tide is quickly turning. Bloor Research already positions IBM as the leader in its recent Enterprise-wide Search report. Look for the enterprise search leader board to change dramatically over the next few years.
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