Search is the star of the software world

Sue Feldman, vice president for search and discovery technologies research at IDC, and author of the report, said: “This particular market has been outpacing the rest of the software market for a number of years. The technologies have become extremely useful for compliance, e-discovery, call centre analysis and interaction because they’re based on language rather than on data.”

Much of the growth has been driven by the need to access unstructured content from many sources, and Feldman described search engines as “a poor man’s integration tool”.

“Because of the scattered nature of most unstructured information, search engines have developed some very sophisticated ways of getting at the information in multiple repositories,” she said. “They know how to query SQL systems, content management systems and legacy applications.”

In terms of revenue, the market is led by Autonomy, although the company has only 15% market share.

The search market covers a wide range of products specialising in different functions, such as enterprise search tools, text analytics tools and e-discovery tools, which are not necessarily competing against each other.

Feldman said she expected search to be integrated with other functionality: “What is happening gradually is the emergence of a new kind of platform for information access and management that brings together content management, database management, information access to both data and content, business intelligence, search and visualisation.”