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Last Visited: 12/3/2008
Sue Feldman believes that it will continue to do so in 2008, despite a slowing economy.
BM looks at what is driving this increase.
The value of search as a true enterprise platform has been touted for years, yet remarkably few organizations have seriously embraced the opportunity, until now.
Sue Feldman, Research Vice President for IDC, believes that this is because IT has gotten used to implementing transaction-based applications.
"It is only recently that enterprises have begun to understand that they have a valuable resource in their unstructured information," says Feldman.
The main driver for adoption has been that understanding has started to spread.
"Those of us who have been in this field for many years have always looked at the technologies we deal with as being completely different from database technologies," explains Feldman.
"However, there hasn't been much headway up until the last couple of years."
Feldman goes on to explain that what has changed in the past couple of years is that compliance and risk management have brought this awareness beyond IT and up to the boardroom.
Organizations realized that they needed a greater degree of control and insight into their unstructured data and best practices have since evolved extremely quickly over the past couple of years, so that they have become better compliant with regulations.
"We are wallowing in a sea of information," says Feldman.
...
While Feldman believes that the software market as a whole is going to grow by around 4 to 5%, she claims the search and discovery market is interesting for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, because it is a new foundational technology and Feldman likens it to the "beginning of the database era".
And secondly, that the technology is important in a various number of ways, which makes people spend on it when they wouldn't spend on other things.
"Email looms as a real threat to organizations because it is so poorly managed and yet so vital to how information workers glue together all of their applications today, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to become a valuable source of information about the current business of the organization," explains Feldman.
Technology
Knitting together all these disparate technology systems, repositories and databases is hugely challenging, but a number of technologies are being built into this in order to unify access to information and pull together data and related content in one place.
Feldman cites a number of technologies that are allowing organizations to use their data to converge search and discovery with business intelligence.
"I can't emphasize enough the importance of pulling together both data and content into one single access point, and that interface is going to become increasingly important because that's what determines the efficiency with which people can accomplish their tasks," says Feldman.
Feldman predicts that in the long-term technologies will be able to understand language in some way.
"We will see that technology will understand the importance of a question, or engage in a conversation with the user, so very much like two humans might in which you would ask a question and remove the ambiguity of that question," says Feldman.
"That's where I think that interfaces and interaction design are going to change radically."
While personalized, contextualized results for all knowledge workers will be produced, Feldman is keen to highlight that it is the conversations themselves that are key.
"We want answers and we want a conversation to get us those answers."
In this respect, it is more about the journey than the destination.
While it will be a gradual evolution towards conversational search it has started already.
Feldman believes that looking at the latest crop of web search engines is a good indicator of what is going to happen as consumer adoption feeds enterprise adoption and vice versa.
"None of what I would consider to be this generation of search engines returns just a list of documents.
The standard today is already indicated answers and clusters of topics related to those answers, so that you can drill down," says Feldman.
Future trends
Feldman also believes that there is a trend towards hybrid applications in which you see search, plus workflow, plus collaboration, plus sort domain or industry knowledge incorporated into a single work environment that is geared towards a particular task.
"Search is becoming a component of this in order to find information within the natural workflow of a person's day.
This is what we are going to start seeing in the future and the conversational systems are a piece of that," explains Feldman.
Hybrid applications are already underway and Feldman believes that the Lexus Nexus interact is a good example in which it is possible to see an environment that was created to support marketing officers in large legal firms.
"EMC has spent months studying how information workers work to create environments that include collaboration search and workflow and you are going to see more and more of these," says Feldman.
As the search and discovery market continues to grow, incorporating increasing amounts of technology and companies become increasingly dependant on organizing, finding and using information, doing it quickly and thoroughly is becoming crucial.
Feldman believes that as technology develops the market will undergo huge changes.
"I would bet that in the next five to 10 years there will be such a difference in how we are able to interact with computers that we will look back at this decade as being the Stone Age," says Feldman.
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