Analyst firm Technavio forecasts the global search and content analytics market to reach $US6 billion during 2016-2020, according to its latest report, with a growth rate of almost 25% driven by the growing importance of deriving useful information from unstructured data.

Technavio ICT analysts highlight the following three factors that are contributing to the growth of the global search and content analytics market:

• Increase in adoption of search and content analytics in industries
• Increasing volume of data
• Use of social media data for content analysis

Iintegration of content analytics applications with IT systems within an organisation helps in communicating with people and other computer systems in real time. It also aids in recollecting previous interactions that assist in drawing conclusions independently while processing large quantities of data from diverse sources. For instance, a content analytics system such as IBM Watson can read millions of text documents in few seconds. The system trails the process of understanding, learning, and evaluating.

Amrita Choudhury, a lead IT security research analyst at Technavio, says, “Search and content analytics systems provide insights and help in the interpretation of large volumes of complex data. They significantly reduce the time taken for research while offering the required speed and agility.

“Content analytics systems provide a complete view of the data from all business processes and enable efficient operations by providing better forecasts. Depending on the inferences of content computing, some processes may be refined, few may be reinvented, and others may be built from scratch.”

Increasing volume of data

The growing volume of data generated by organizations is a major factor driving the growth of the global search and content analytics market. Organizational data is generated from sources that include enterprise applications, web-based searches, social networks, and cloud-based applications.

“An organization produces structured as well as unstructured data. Structured data is derived from traditional applications like enterprise resource planning and CRM tools. Unstructured data is derived from web-based searches, social networks, and cloud-based applications.

“Organisations are adopting data analytics to maximize their profits, increase revenue, and save costs. Content analytics helps to eliminate the major work involved in understanding customers and the data tracking process. It helps to attract new customers and also analyses existing data patterns to offer better services to existing customers and to retain them.

“Content analytics software provides the best ways to data processing, helps in making better business decisions, and increases an organization's performance,” adds Choudhury.