Enterprise Search Technology Evaluation Report

Introduction

As organizations address the requirements of faster and better decision making, they need enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) solutions, and tools that can deal with the rapidly increasing volumes of available information both within, and around the enterprise. Such solutions need to address the multiple issues of usability, integration and security, scalability and performance needs.

Features and benefits

• This report provides strategy for the CIO, analysis of the technologies for the CTO and objective comparisons for selection.
• Comprehensive features matrix and functional analysis of 12 of the most important products in the market
• Discussion and analysis of the importance federation, the convergence with BI technologies and the impact of social media.

Highlights

There are a few large vendors, a myriad of small and emerging vendors, and now well-established, and credible open source software (OSS) alternatives. An increasing level of embedded ESR functionality being found within applications, particularly those fromthe larger vendors or via OEM.

There are now a number of mature OSS products, and most importantly a range of integrators to deploy and support them. Their functionality is sufficient for most organizational needs, and there is a wide range of interfaces and tools available to support integration into existing IT environments.

Some commentators believe that the market for ESR solutions and the number of ‘significant’ solutions have both reduced to the point where analyses such as this report are no longer relevant. Ovum completely disagrees demand for ESR solutions, as this reprt shows has arguably never been higher.

Your key questions answered

• Open source is a viable/reliable/demonstrable alternative to proprietary solutions, but there may be additional services costs.
• No one solution will meet all of an organization’s ESR requirements, domain focussed solutions give benefits.
• Organizations need to follow a structured project management methodology to get the best value from ESR solutions.