Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2006

Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2006

No new Leaders emerged in this year's iteration of the Magic Quadrant for information access technology. Acquisitions and vision improvements
have nevertheless forced significant changes in positioning throughout.

This Magic Quadrant includes vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a collection of technologies, including: 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 (or personal knowledge) search to address user-controlled repositories 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 inherently not Visionaries or candidates for the Leaders quadrant. Finding information, and acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and innovative strategies.

We now recommend that Global 2000 enterprises at least select a platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability. Enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase the agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Such tactical vendors may lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but they are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Enterprises must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for important and specific projects, such as customer interaction hubs, e-commerce search or research science support.