This document was revised on 1 October 2008. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies. Their capabilities include search; federated search, content classification, categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop search to address user-controlled repositories in order to locate and "invoke" documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.

We consider all enterprise search vendors to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant, although they are part of the market. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies and technologies.

We recommend that large commercial and government enterprises select at least an information access platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. These enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often, enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for certain important projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science support.

Information access technologies access applications such as document management, Web content management and relational database management systems to provide users with insight into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition, it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.

The first and most mature information access technology is search engine technology. It has been common since the mid-1990s, and is typically applied to unstructured data in document repositories. It includes both enterprise and desktop search. Increasingly, auto categorization, creative visualization, content analytics and taxonomy support technologies are being added to this category.

This Magic Quadrant addresses enterprise information access vendors. Many of these vendors orient their technology specifically toward addressing particular business problems, such as issues of legal discovery and publishing. Many also offer desktop search applications, and although such personal search technology is not a primary focus of, or a requirement for, any of the vendors we have included, its importance is growing. Information access appliances are increasingly popular as enterprises like their simplicity. Also, content analytics is emerging as a category of its own; it is not fully covered here, but is a critical aspect of our innovation measure. Many vendors that don't offer search do provide numerous content analytics functions.

Total software revenue in the world's enterprise search market in 2007 was $860.3 million. We forecast it to grow to $1.5 billion by 2012, for a compound annual growth rate of 11.4% (see "Dataquest Insight: Technology and Vendor Consolidation Will Drive the Enterprise Search Market Through 2012").

The enterprise information access market, like most technology markets (although not necessarily many of those that have existed as long), has seen many acquisitions, though the long-term trend for consolidation is partly offset by the arrival of new vendors. Most notably, during the past year, Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian information access leader, in a major transaction with far-reaching ramifications. In some cases, consolidation eliminates software and ultimately forces clients to shift to new packages; for example, when Autonomy acquired Verity, it started moving clients to its own software; Fast Search & Transfer did the same when it bought AltaVista and later Convera's enterprise business. In other cases, the impact is lesser — Microsoft, for instance, is maintaining Fast Search & Transfer's software and has even pledged a commitment to support it on Linux. Most important, the variety of choices from midsize vendors is shrinking as the megavendors compete in this market with growing enthusiasm.

Information access technologies find, collect and condense information or map its native location, so that users may actively seek it, analyze it effectively and remain informed about it. Enterprise search, in which users' queries are matched against an index to return relevant documents and data, is an element of information access. Information access also includes more sophisticated capabilities, such as elements of content analytics.

We have included in this Magic Quadrant only those vendors that incorporate search as the foundational capability of their information access products. Many include other capabilities such as auto categorization, taxonomy functions and clustering, but those that offer only these capabilities, with no search, were excluded.

We have only included vendors that actively market their products in two or more of the following continental markets: Asia, North America, South America, Europe and Australia. We also required vendors to have grossed more than $12 million in revenue (for any kind of sale) in the four quarters ending 31 March 2008. Publicly traded vendors' filings were considered sufficient evidence of this. Privately held vendors were asked to provide documentation supporting such figures, and third-party sources were also consulted.

We also required that vendors actively market their products in more than two major vertical markets, and in more than one horizontal application category (such as e-commerce and customer self-service).

Open-source search engines do exist, but none is significant enough to threaten the commercial market. Lucene is the most prominent, but we have excluded it because it is not a commercial entity and is supported by a non-commercial community. However, it is growing in influence, as numerous vendors are turning to it to manage indexing. With rare exceptions, enterprises find it too taxing, in terms of resources, to develop with. However, the arrival of Solr, a product founded on Lucene, could change this situation in the medium term.

In addition, we required that vendors be able to sell their information access products separately from other products (such as portals, infrastructure, records management and CRM offerings). This meant the exclusion of SAP, which stopped selling its search products separately from its portal products in August 2008, although the vendor says this will change with the release of a new SAP Enterprise Search product (initially scheduled for the first half of 2008, but since delayed by a change of strategy).

Fabasoft/Mindbreeze is new this year to the Magic Quadrant. This European vendor has traction in central Europe and has started trying to penetrate the U.S. market.

Many vendors have been removed from the Magic Quadrant this year because they did not meet one of more of the inclusion criteria. These criteria are considerably stricter this year, because enterprises are increasingly looking to a core set of vendors with substantial financial resources and long-term prospects. Consequently, the following vendors do not appear this year: Business Objects (now part of SAP), Consona, Coveo, Dieselpoint, dtSearch, InQuira, IntelliSearch, Kaidara Software, Mercado, Mondosoft (now owned by SurfRay), Omniture, PolySpot, Progress Software, Siderean Software, SLI Systems, Thunderstone, WCC and X1 Technologies. Their exclusion does not reflect any major change in their suitability for projects — only alterations to our inclusion criteria.

Fast Search & Transfer is now analyzed under Microsoft, its new owner.

Product/service is largely determined by a product's versatility in providing connectors for security models and its ability to connect to repositories effectively. Additionally, the operating systems supported are a minor component of this score.

Overall viability of a vendor is determined by a number of financial indicators, such as cash and cash equivalents, number of full-time (or equivalent) employees and profits. We also considered whether a vendor is publicly traded, as this affects enterprises' perception of its strength.

Sales execution/pricing reflects the licenses sold in the last year, revenue and the appeal of the vendor's pricing models.

Customer experience reflects what we know of a vendor's performance from our own experience, and impressions of its position and performance gained through our inquiry and outreach services.

Operations assesses a vendor's geographical breadth in sales and support.

Market responsiveness and track record and marketing execution are not covered.

Market understanding is a combination of the vision that a vendor's management has for how to thrive in the extremely challenging market for information access technology and of how that vision is manifested in practice.

Marketing strategy assesses how a vendor actually brings its products to market, including its choice of vertical and horizontal markets and the logic of its strategic marketing goal.

Offering (product) strategy reflects a vendor's abilities to scale from the perspectives of user volume and data volume; provide innovative and broad relevancy models using document content and other information (such as user behavior); analyze user queries; address desktop, enterprise and Web content together.

Business model assesses a vendor's product and service delivery models; greater breadth in such models — particularly those with the greatest potential — confers a better score.

Vertical/industry strategy looks at a vendor's range of credible offerings for vertical markets, and at how appropriate those markets are for strategic investment, based on how fertile they are likely to prove for that vendor. This criterion also accounts for installations the vendor can cite to demonstrate its ability to support transformational projects.

Innovation is assessed by looking at several different factors. These include the vendor's abilities to address non-textual documents and objects (including audio and video); federate queries and mix or juxtapose results; perform content analytics; aid users in disambiguating results through conversational interfaces; use elements not resident in documents to establish relevancy (such as citation analysis); and provide enterprise administrators with clear, meaningful reports on why particular data is returned as relevant.

Geographic strategy is covered not here but under operations (see the Ability to Execute criteria).

Sales strategy is not covered.

All the Leaders demonstrate significant architectural flexibility. They also have strong, innovative and broad means of determining the relevancy of results returned to users, and of providing developers with the tools and the flexibility to tune relevancy settings. They have the finances to weather hard times and sufficient resources to invest in both organic and inorganic technology and business growth. They also have enough depth and strength to serve as platform vendors whose software can be used to solve most information access problems.

Challengers possess sufficient resources to penetrate the information access technology market effectively. However, they typically lack the vision to address all information access opportunities. Information access technology for enterprise use is not a core source of revenue for Challengers. Any of these vendors could emerge as Leaders in less than 24 months, if they invest adeptly in information access technology.

Visionaries demonstrate imaginative and insightful approaches to the information access technology market, but currently lack the resources to prove their leadership and guarantee future strength. They all possess architectural flexibility and creative means of establishing relevancy. Greater financial resources and more market traction would improve their position. Visionaries could become Leaders through stronger market performance. Recommind and Exalead are the only Visionaries in this year's Magic Quadrant, as changes to our inclusion criteria eliminated several previous members of this quadrant.

Niche Players possess the attributes necessary to fulfill the needs of certain types of information access project, but they lack the depth and breadth to satisfy a wide variety of projects. In some cases, they lack the proven financial resources of Leaders and Challengers. Nor can they demonstrate the depth of vision that indicates they are leading the market. On the other hand, they are typically right for a particular set of needs, and they offer attractive pricing, special capabilities and vertical-market knowledge.