Economic Trends in Enterprise Search Solutions

Enterprise search technology retrieves information within organizations. This data can be proprietary and public, and access to it may be restricted or not. Enterprise search solutions render business processes more efficient particularly in data-intensive companies. This technology is key to increasing the competitiveness of the digital economy; thus it constitutes a strategic market for the European Union. The Enterprise Search Solution (ESS) market was worth close to 1,100 million USD (approximately 831 million EUR) in 2008 and is expected to grow quicker than the overall market for information and knowledge management systems (Gartner 2009). Optimistic market forecasts expect market size to exceed 1,900 million USD (approximately 1,435 million EUR) by the end of 2013. Other market analyses see the growth rate slowing down and stabilizing at around 10% a year as from 2010. Even in the least favourable case, enterprise search remains an attractive market, particularly because of the opportunities expected to arise from the convergence of ESS and Information Systems. This report looks at the demand and supply side of ESS and provides data about the market. It describes the current situation and presents the evolution of market dynamics over the past decade. Our main thesis is that ESS is currently placed at the point where two established markets, namely web search and the management of information systems, overlap. The report offers evidence that these two markets are converging and discusses the role of the different stakeholders (providers of web search engines, enterprise resource management tools, pure enterprise search tools, etc.) in this changing context.