Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Gartner this month released its influential Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology report, which assesses vendor capabilities in areas such as enterprise and federated search, content analytics, and desktop search.

You won’t find the word “semantic” in the report, but you will find plenty of vendors in the various quadrants that are incorporating semantic web principles or technology in their offerings for enterprise users.

Google (positioned in the Challengers quadrant) and Microsoft (in the Leaders section), the report notes, essentially dominate the market for the simplest installations, for project costs weighing in at less than $75,000 for the first couple of years. Microsoft acquired Powerset last year, following its previous purchase of Fast Seach & Transfer, to forward its enterprise search vision with semantic search capabilities. As the information-access-market sees increasing consolidation, it’s companies including Microsoft — along with IBM and Oracle and with Google coming on stronger — that tend to be viewed as the default choice in organizations where search is increasingly perceived as infrastructure. That is “forcing independent vendors to specialize in particular business problems, most of which cross multiple verticals,” Gartner says. It continues:

“While the need for search remains strong, it is not likely to see substantial growth again in generalist products, sold separately from other applications. The time and effort devoted by many major vendors to addressing search across their product lines means enterprises will continue to acquire and incorporate search into their projects, but not that they will invest in stand-alone search products from midsize vendors. The market will shift to very large vendors selling platforms as aspects of their product lines, and significantly smaller vendors selling applications founded in search that will not be otherwise available. ”

That may include some of the vendors with semantics in their portfolio. The Niche Players quadrant, which is defined in part by vendors whose technologies are right for a particular set of needs, special capabilities, and vertical-market or application knowledge, includes semantic players Expert System and Sinequa. The report cites Expert System as being extremely good at analyzing and searching external data sets for competitive and market intelligence and for being highly extensible and allowing for significant customization.

“Enterprises with the resources to devote the necessary time and effort to Expert System customization are extremely pleased with its depth and power,” Gartner says, while noting the solution targets smaller scale installations and the vendor doesn’t invest significantly in the ability to exploit users’ historical behavior or explicit status in an organization as a means of determining the relevancy of results.

Sinequa CS — which says it uses a combination of its patented semantic algorithms alongside statistical, structured and syntax analyses to help users navigate, retrieve and organize relevant information in a consistent and reliable fashion — was cited for having strong content analytics and relevancy capabilities, but lacking significant capabilities for federated search.

In the leaders quadrant you’ll also find mentions of companies such as Endeca and Autonomy. Endeca isn’t specifically a semantic web company, but its chief scientist Daniel Tunkelang has noted the vendor shares Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of exposing the semantic content of data to reduce the processes that people use today in order to meet their information needs. Gartner notes the solution has a broad capability to index from a variety of content sources and a particular facility with action-oriented content analytics — it also notes that its size and current market conditions make it a good acquisition target. Autonomy’s IDOL technology provides semantic search capabilities and it recently introduced, by way of its acquisition of Interwoven, a Social Media Analysis Tool. That lets companies crawl social-networking sites for relevant information about products, analyze that information and store it in a repository that links directly to the Interwoven content-management system.

The vendor’s strengths, Gartner says, include deep user providing, good content analytics, and facility with non-textual multimedia searching. The vendor, Gartner says, is seeking to expand into law firms and web content management such as online marketing.

The specialist route is a good one, Gartner notes, emphasizing that the market for information access technology was significantly altered in 2008 and 2009.

“Specialist capability addressing particular business challenges or, in some cases, challenges in particular verticals, has proved to be the most lucrative direction for vendors to take,” it writes. ” ‘Cloud’ architectures are sure to drive a new wave of disruption favoring cloud specialists such as Microsoft and Google, and open-source alternatives with increased credibility are proliferating and gaining visibility. The result is a market in which specialists are favored in deals that match their skills, and generalists are favored when their products have predictable, affordable prices.”

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