The worldwide information access with search technology industry growth will slow starting in 2008, because of continued downward pressure on license prices.  The market is forecasted to grow to more than $1.1 billion in total software revenue by 2011. 

This market is growing as companies want search technology that is transparent and easily understandable by users. Enterprises looking to manage, organize and search wide varieties of content inside and outside their organizations will drive the market, according to Gartner.

“Enterprise information access technologies are maturing and now offer better indexing, querying, presentation and drill-down of results,” said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner. “However, the real value of information access technologies is in the upfront and ongoing efforts needed to establish effective taxonomies, to index, and to classify content of all kinds that must be accessed. By itself, the search function has limited value.”

Gartner uses the term "information access" to encompass a collection of technologies, including enterprise search; content classification; categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; content analytics, information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop or personal knowledge search to address user-controlled repositories to locate and invoke documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.

Additional information is available in the report “Dataquest Insight:  Forecast for Information Access with Search Technology in the Enterprise, 2006-2011."