BOSTON, MA, USA and LEIDEN, The Netherlands -- Enterprise search buyers are increasingly looking to specialized search vendors to achieve the ever-elusive goal of single-point information retrieval and access, according to research released today by independent analyst and product evaluation firm, CMS Watch.

"Our customers and the search managers interviewed for our research continue to struggle with enterprise search," said Theresa Regli, CMS Watch Principal. "Many of them have been pushed by management to use a search offering from a large vendor that's specialized for searching a particular environment, like SharePoint or SAP. But those tools don’t necessarily extend well to other environments or repositories."

The findings in today's release of CMS Watch's Search & Information Access subscription service show an increasingly specialized focus in particular environments or verticals from search vendors. "SurfRay continues to focus its product on searching better within SharePoint than Microsoft's own search engine, while Recommind digs deeper into implementing clairvoyant search within legal environments," notes CMS Watch Analyst Kas Thomas. "Meanwhile, it's not often that a well-known software vendor simply vacates the search space and limits the use of its search technology to customers of their other products. Yet, that's what Open Text has decided to do."

The research also found that:

• Steady improvements in SharePoint search have not dissuaded Microsoft-focused companies from looking at Microsoft-focused search alternatives like Coveo, SurfRay or ISYS.
• Organizations are still proliferating repositories, making enterprise search harder. Few enterprise search vendors are keeping up with the diversity of repositories that must be searched in the typical enterprise.
• Smaller, specialized search vendors such as ISYS, Sinequa, dtSearch and Vivisimo are debuting connectors to diverse repositories at a more rapid pace than larger infrastructure competitors such as SAP or Microsoft do.

"Just because our information access and retrieval needs expand as fast or faster than our technology and operations can evolve doesn't mean organizations should give up," adds CMS Watch Analyst Adriaan Bloem. "In fact, the smart enterprise keeps working on this even though the ultimate goal seems to be an elusive moving target.”