The IDC report, written by Sue Feldman, vice president for search and discovery technologies research, titled "Worldwide Search and Discovery Software, 2008 - 2012 Forecast Update and 2008 Vendor Shares: Bloom Amid Economic Gloom[1]" found that the search and discovery software market grew to $1.8 billion in 2007, a growth rate of 28%. This market continues to outpace the software market as a whole in 2008, and IDC believes that it will continue to do so, despite a slowing economy.
"There are a number of reasons for the continuing growth we see in the search market," said Feldman. "While the economy is slowing, the need to manage non-transactional information has become critical, and enterprises are investing in the next big information-centric computing platform. This market is also driven by government investment in intelligence applications, and by industries such as pharmaceuticals and energy that are heavily dependent on dependable, easy access to good information from multiple sources. Enterprises find that unless they can provide a single access point to all of their information-- including email--and manage it with a consistent set of policies, they will be at risk for poor decisions, for non-compliance, and for less-than-optimal customer relations."
The report found that businesses have become more dependent on finding and using their information as that information proliferates and the organization ceases to depend on keepers of central files. Particularly in the developed world, the economy has become more and more information based. Gathering, organizing, managing, finding, and analyzing that information is now crucial to most businesses. In addition, unifying access to both structured and unstructured information is slowly being recognized as a new enterprise requirement. This trend is driven by the need to understand the customer - in emails, voicemails, blogs, wikis, and CRM systems.
"At this point, it is clear that Autonomy should no longer be considered purely a search vendor. It builds search-based applications to answer market demands for better information-centric software," continued Feldman.
"We're really pleased to see our dominance in the enterprise search market with our market share double our nearest rival," said Stouffer Egan, CEO of Autonomy Inc. "This rapid growth is testament to the new meaning based computing movement."
Autonomy's pan enterprise search platform, IDOL, performs conceptual and contextual analysis and probability matching on information to find the meaning within and the inter-relationships between and among disparate pieces of content. This unique approach allows global organizations to find and access the most pertinent content for business value or risk management, irrespective of languages, operating systems, and file types. By supporting more than 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories, Autonomy can search all categories of information repositories in an organization, enabling companies to maintain compliance with government regulations, such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). IDOL is fault-tolerant using load balancing and mirroring, highly scalable, secure, and has sub-second performance on billions of files.