Independent analyst firm CMS Watch has found that enterprise search vendors are evolving at a more rapid pace than their products.
The company's Enterprise Search Report 2008 evaluates 20 major enterprise search vendors head-to-head. The analysis says several vendors, such as FAST and Mondosoft, have been subject to acquisitions, and others, such as SAP and Oracle, have recently released search offerings. It says in many ways product marketing is ahead of the actual technology.
Adriaan Bloem, who served as lead researcher and is CMS Watch's Netherlands-based contributing analyst, says while a few large infrastructure vendors are pushing new search offerings, the technology underneath is alike.
He said the research also revealed that in addition to legacy technology being re-packaged and marketed as new products, Microsoft's acquisition of FAST strengthens the fact that despite recent product development for SharePoint search, it is still way behind other enterprise search offerings and not suited to true multi-repository, enterprise-wide search.
According to him, while SAP unveiled its own enterprise search tool based largely on the legacy TREX search application, its recent investment in specialised search vendor Endeca clearly shows the differences and gaps that still exist in enterprise search products.
He says that even though three years have passed since Autonomy acquired its competitor Verity, rapid change at the vendor, and alongside it, its suite of tools, continues. "Fusing disparate corporate philosophies and technological approaches has taken time, and there's still a mishmash of products and technologies in the works."
"The turbulent shifts currently happening in the market show just how much infrastructure vendors want to play in the enterprise search space, but the products aren't evolving quickly enough to meet enterprise needs," added CMS Watch principal, Theresa Regli. "At the same time, more agile, specialised search vendors want to fill the gaps that the larger vendors currently can't fill."
She concludes that CMS Watch's goal is not to cite leaders and laggards, but to show the pace at which the products and vendors are evolving. Different states of evolution involve different levels of risk, and buyers should enter the product selection and implementation process with eyes wide open.
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