I spent yesterday morning at Ovum’s briefing on Enterprise Search, and they kindly invited me to sit on a discussion panel. One of the more controversial topics raised by analyst Mike Davis was ‘Is Enterprise Search dead?’ which provoked some lively discussion. We also heard from Tyler Tate of Twigkit on Search UX, Exalead on Search Based Applications and Search Technologies on data conditioning and why metadata is so important.
One can’t deny that the search market is going through some huge changes at the moment. Larger vendors are being acquired which can lead to some major (and not always welcome) changes in the product, pricing and service. Smaller vendors are finding it increasingly hard to compete with the plethora of powerful open source solutions (we’ve heard rumours of prices of closed source solutions being dropped radically to attempt to secure new business). There are also some interesting moves towards more comprehensive Business Intelligence and Unified Access solutions, such as Attivio.
I don’t think enterprise search is dying as a market or an offering, simply changing – and hopefully for the better, into an era of more realistic pricing, solutions that actually work (rather than promising ‘magic’) and more openness in terms of the technology and capability.
