The global enterprise search market reaped revenues of more than US$1.47bn in 2012 and that figure is forecast to be US$4.68bn by 2019, analysis by business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan suggests.
This projected growth is down to an expected increase in global adoption of enterprise search solutions as organisations strive to search, discover and retrieve information from vast volumes of data in real-time to enhance productivity.
“The critical business need to eliminate duplication of effort has boosted the adoption of enterprise search systems,” said Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Sashankh Kale.
“Search solutions that efficiently manage information and facilitate informed, profitable decisions are gaining popularity.”
Big data and the enterprise search solutions market
The growth of big data is feeding the enterprise search solutions market with more opportunities, and demand for personalised search tools that operate in a pool of unlimited data from internal servers, the internet, or third-party sources is also growing, according to Frost & Sullivan.
“However, the disparity between customer expectations and actual search outcomes could dissuade future investments. Customers expect a single query to retrieve the right results immediately. Therefore, search providers must offer timely and relevant results, taking into account the continuous addition of new data to repositories,” Frost & Sullivan said.
Frost & Sullivan’s analysis revealed that about 80pc of new data is unstructured, and the various forms in which it is stored increases the complexity of taxonomy and indexing.
Search vendors, therefore, are looking beyond meta-data tagging and towards statistical and probabilistic algorithms, deep-content analytics, and pattern detection. They are also designing solutions that will let them familiarise themselves with an enterprise’s search habits, the firm said.
“As vendors continue to offer newer functionalities, such as federated, social, and concept search, customers are also becoming aware of their effectiveness,” said Kale. “Thus, these solutions are likely to experience demand from various verticals.”
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