Urge for unified access to informtion to drive growth for BI and Search - IDC
Information access applications will drive growth for the business intelligence (BI), search, and discovery markets, according to a recent IDC study. The study finds that organizations have discovered wide gaps in their business intelligence, and increasingly require unified access to all of their information. The recent rise in demand for unified access to information has spawned the creation of new, innovative software applications that combine data and content from multiple sources.
"The content markets took off in 2005, growing at over 35%. Organizations now realize that they must have a complete and up-to-the-minute view of the state of their business. Responding to this need, search and discovery application vendors have developed new approaches that unify access to both data and content. In the process, they have begun to muscle their way into the business intelligence market. It will be interesting to see who will dominate this new unified access market", says IDC
The study reveals that business intelligence vendors will be adding content technologies such as categorization, fuzzy matching, and text analytics to their applications through acquisitions and partnerships with content vendors. The study finds that while content vendors clearly have the edge in functionality, business intelligence vendors have the greater market share. IDC predicts that this will lead to a convergence of these two markets and technologies. Meanwhile, the study indicates that database vendors have been slower to recognize that they are missing pieces needed to achieve unified access to information.
IDC added, "Both content and business intelligence/database vendors need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their technologies and the synergy that combining them provides. Both sets of vendors also need to move from the hype to the hard facts in educating the marketplace. An educated marketplace that understands the different approaches to information access, discovery, and analysis will shorten the sales cycle and boost sales."