Martin White of CMS Wire recently predicted that search, semantic and otherwise, will be a business critical application in 2013. He writes, “Looking back, 2012 has been quite a year for search. From a business perspective Lexmark acquired Isys-Search, Lucid Imagination changed its name, Attivio gained a US$ 37 million investment, Coveo followed with an US$ 18 million investment, Apache Lucene and Solr moved to Release 4, ElasticSearch set up a commercial arm and Microsoft announced a seriously well-featured SharePoint 2013 search application. Gradually a picture of search implementation is beginning to emerge, thanks to surveys from Findwise, MarkLogic, Oracle and AIIM. The picture is not a pretty one. All agree that information is a business-critical asset but companies have failed to understand the urgent need to provide technology and support for search.”

White continues, “The 2011/2012 search vendor acquisition frenzy took out most of the mid-range vendors. In 2013 we will find out whether smaller commercial vendors can attract the investment they need to bring their technologies to a wider market or whether the space will be taken by open-source applications. The evidence may be along the lines of LucidWorks, Attivio, IntraFind and Polyspot, in which Lucene/Solr is blended with a range of open-source and proprietary modules. That is not to say that internal or external developers cannot build excellent open-source applications but many IT managers feel reassured by a post-implementation contract with a company that has investors to keep happy.”

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Image: Courtesy Flickr/ Jeffrey Beall