A Search Market Craters – Welcome to the App Diaspora.After the collapse of the economy two years ago, a market force took effect that has led to the “cratering,” of a small but telling sector of the enterprise search market.The story demonstrates how open-source technologies are now more than alternatives for enterprise search. They are the norm.
Hadley Reynolds, a senior analyst at IDC, said in a presentation last week atLucene Revolution that the enterprise “OEM” search market is expected to drop from more than $100 million in 2007 to $50 million by 2011. The market has traditionally included companies such as Autonomy and FAST, which was sold to Microsoft and is now integrated with Sharepoint.
“We see the OEM search market as essentially cratering,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds says the OEM search software license revenue has been declining, in part due to the increasing adoption ofLucene by independent software vendors. He also attributes the decline on other market factors such as Microsoft’s decision not to further advance the FAST OEM search product after acquiring that company in 2008.
Reynolds said that In its wake, the enterprise is adopting open-source technologies such as Lucene.
Lucene has risen considerably in popularity. It is now a top 5 Apache project. It has more than 7,000 downloads per day.
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