Search and Discovery Market Defies Economic Gloom

By Greg McNevin

October 28, 2008: New research from IDC has found that the search and discovery software market continues to bloom and grow despite the gloomy economic environment.

The analyst firm has found that the search and discovery market in 2007 and in the first half of 2008 has continued to outpace the software market as a whole.

Next to this, the firm says that while the pure-play search software market continues to consolidate rampant mergers and acquisitions, search technologies have begun to penetrate traditional data-centric enterprise and consumer applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), recommendation engines, and ad matching.

“Despite the current economic crisis, the search and discovery software market is a bright spot that so far shows no signs of slowing down,” said Susan Feldman, vice president, Search and Discovery Technologies at IDC.

“Although this market has continued its rapid growth in the first half of 2008, economic indicators for IT spending are bleak. For that reason, IDC expects slower growth in all markets, including search and discovery software.”

Feldman added that although external factors will impinge on what is a fast growing market, the firm is still predicting 17 percent growth for search and discovery software in 2008 and 12.9 percent for 2009.

“This is down from the 28 percent growth observed in 2007, but still a healthy increase,” said Feldman.

The study, titled “Worldwide Search and Discovery Software 2008-2012 Forecast Update and Vendor Shares: Bloom Amid Economic Gloom” also found that:

• The search market will continue to fragment into three tiers: OEM, solutions, and platforms, with solutions that address a specific task or problem growing at a faster rate than the other two market segments.
• Text analytics vendors as a group will continue to see even faster growth than the search market. Hot areas include sentiment extraction, eDiscovery, geolocation, and language modules.
• As search and text analytics become technology features in larger software applications, we can expect the current spate of technology-driven mergers and acquisitions to continue, and business intelligence to continue to converge with search.

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