We've recently published our "2012 Enterprise Search Market Analysis." After 2011's raft of acquisitions, this year promises to be another interesting one for search customers:

• The fall-out from the HP/Autonomy and Oracle/Endeca deals in 2011 has created something of a vacuum in the upper tiers of the search market. To varying degrees, both of these deals will engender a degree of uncertainty amongst their existing and prospective customers alike until the future shape of the products becomes clearer.
   
• In part because of all the industry M&A activity, Apache Solr has become almost a default option for many enterprises when approaching search-based projects. The question being increasingly asked is, "Can Solr do this?" Other players get considered only where Solr lacks functionality or maturity, or the cost of implementation/customisation becomes too onerous.
   
• At the same time, longstanding players in this space - such as Coveo and Exalead - are continuing to focus less on Enterprise Search and more on producing abstraction tools for querying and visualising data. Although behind the scenese these platforms are still performing familiar search functions, the trend is following search buyers who have migrated from pure IT, towards more business-focused tasks. It is those business users that are providing the contemporary scenarios for this technology.

These are just a few of the highlights from our 2012 Enterprise Search Market Overview, which is available for immediate download by search stream research subscribers, and for separate purchase by anyone else.

On top of an extended market and trends analysis, we highlight many of the vendors we cover and assess their current positioning and potential risk they represent to you, the buyer and implementer of these technologies. As always, be sure to let us know if you have any questions.