Search Technology Market Will Grow 10 Percent

STAMFORD, Conn., March 7, 2006 - The quest for enterprises trying to manage, organize and search content inside and outside of their organizations in a way that is transparent and easily understood, will drive worldwide information access with search technology new license revenue to total $368.9 million in 2006, up 10 percent from $335.4 million in 2005, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts said the information access technologies market is being revitalized. Users can access more information across an expanding set of content stores, including e-mail, file servers, intranets, extranets and the Web. More-robust taxonomy and classification functionality will provide more-accurate and faster results.

"Enterprise information access technologies are entering a new phase of deployment and use," said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner. "Technologies are maturing and now offer improved indexing, querying, presentation and drilldown of results. However, by itself the search function has limited value. The real value of information access technologies is in the upfront and ongoing efforts needed to establish effective taxonomies, to index and classify content of all kinds in order to provide meaningful results."

Gartner uses the term "information access" to encompass a collection of technologies, including enterprise search; content classification; categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop or personal knowledge search to address user-controlled repositories to locate and invoke documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.

The worldwide information access with search technology industry will experience healthy growth the next few years, however growth will slow starting in 2008, because of continued downward pressure on license prices.

"As long as search and information access capability remains a compelling business requirement at both the desktop and enterprise level, many vendors, from startups to established vendors, will compete to provide basic and highly focused offerings," said Mr. Eid. "However, no one vendor can solve all information access needs. Search and information access is not a one-size-fits-all marketplace, and the market will continue to develop, whether within individual devices, through organizational intranets, across the Web, or specialized in a digital asset type."