David Fishman of Lucid Imagination has blogged on how open source search is treated by the analyst community (you can even use his links to get hold of some of the reports mentioned for the usual price of your contact details). We can add to his list a report from the Real Story Group – and I hear Ovum will shortly release an updated report.
What I find most interesting about these analyst reports is how various vendors are subdivided – either by target market, or by size, or by how ‘complex’ their platform is. Open source solutions don’t always fit the categories – for example Real Story Group list ‘Apache Project’ as a ‘specialised vendor’ – which it really isn’t. Perhaps it’s time for some new categories in these analyst reports – maybe a list of specialist open source integrators, linked with the available technologies such as Lucene, Xapian or Sphinx, combined with some data about likely costs.
