Enterprise Search: Search Combined with Big Data Opens up Big Opportunities

The global enterprise search market reached $1.47  billion in 2012 and will grow to $4.68 billion by 2019, predicts Frost & Sullivan.  A report by Findwise found that 75 percent of companies say that the ability to quickly and accurately search and find information in their business to be a critical factor for success.

Sashankh Kale, Frost & Sullivan industry analyst, said that “Search solutions that efficiently manage information and facilitate informed, profitable decisions are gaining popularity… As vendors continue to offer newer functionalities such as federated, social, and concept search, customers are also becoming aware of their effectiveness.  Thus, these solutions are likely to experience demand from various verticals.”

Many see the combination of Big Data with Search to be a very compelling opportunity.  Grant Ingersoll, Chief Scientist for LucidWorks, said that “Search is the UI for data today.”

But the enterprise search market is moving rapidly and the players in the market have seen big changes over the last couple of years.  Many of the pioneers and leaders of this space have been acquired.  Those companies  include Verity, Autonomy, FAST, Endeca, Exalead and ISYS.  And there has been the rise of Open Source search, particularly Lucene and Solr from LucidWorks.

Open Source Solr and/or Lucene are used by companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, Facebook, Groupon, Shopzilla, AT&T, Sears, Ford and Verizon.  By using Lucene, Twitter is able to index four hundred million tweets within 50 milliseconds of being posted, and then provides search results to more than a billion queries every day.  Matt Mullen, analyst at the Real Story Group, commented in a blog article that “Apache Solr has become almost a default option for many enterprises when approaching search-based projects. The question being increasingly asked is, ‘Can Solr do this?’ Other players get considered only where Solr lacks functionality or maturity, or the cost of implementation/customization becomes too onerous.”

Paul Doscher, CEO of LucidWorks, said that “Clients are asking about open source and Lucene and Solr technologies as a hedge against the future downside of acquisitions.  FAST won’t be supported on Linux or any other platform. We’re seeing a migration away from FAST customers that don’t want to implement a Microsoft stack.  Customers [of Microsft, Oracle and IBM] now have to be concerned about pricing and support and from a roadmap perspective. They’re interested in Lucene and Solr because there’s no vendor lock in. “