New Year predictions: further search storms ahead!

2012 has been a fascinating and stormy year for those of us in the search business. We’ve seen a raft of further acquisitions of commercial closed source search companies by bigger players, some convinced that what used to be called Enterprise Search is now a solution to Big Data (like Stephen Arnold we wonder what will succeed Big Data as the next marketing term – I love his phrase “In a quest for revenue, the vendors will wrap basic ideas in a cloud of unknowing”). One acquisition hasn’t gone so smoothly: Autonomy, bought by HP for a price that no-one in the search business thought was remotely sensible, has been accused of being oversold vapourware: this is a story that will continue to develop in 2013. If you want a great overview of the current market read Martin White’s latest research note.

Here in the slightly calmer waters of open source search, we’ve seen a huge rise in enquiries from often blue-chip companies, no longer needing persuasion that open source is a serious contender for even the largest search and content projects. Often these companies have considered large commercial solutions but are put off by both the price and high-pressure marketing tactics – in a world of reduced budgets you simply can’t sell magic beans for a pile of gold. We’ve also seen increased interest in related technologies such as machine learning and automatic categorisation – search really isn’t just about search any more.

At Flax we’re busier than we have ever been and we’re expected the trend to continue. We’re looking forward to running more Cambridge Search Meetups, visiting and helping organise conferences such as Enterprise Search Europe and Lucene Revolution, building our network of carefully chosen partners and of course working on exciting and cutting-edge development projects.

As the storms in our sector continue to rage overhead we’ll simply be getting on with what we do best, building effective search.

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