It's not often that a well-known vendor simply vacates a particular software space, effectively forfeiting a chunk of the market to competitors. But that's what Open Text has decided to do with its main enterprise search product.

Late last year, in the course of updating our Search & Information Access Research, we were informed by Open Text Corporation that a decision had been made to discontinue the company's Discovery Server search offering. Open Text will continue to apply its search technology to their other products, but no longer sell it as a free-standing offering.

A spokesperson for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company explained: "We have altered our strategy away from dividing our development efforts between the standalone offering (Discovery Server) and the search of our ECM Suite, to focusing solely on the search capabilities of our Suite." Accordingly, "Open Text is no longer actively marketing Discovery Server to the standalone Enterprise Search market. We have committed to key customers that we will support them going forward."

Regular readers of our Search & Information Access Research already know that Open Text has, for quite some time now, effectively treated Discovery Server as an upsell piece for its existing ECM customers rather than a true standalone search offering in the spirit of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, say, or IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition. It's been years since Open Text put any significant marketing muscle behind Discovery Server (to the extent that it ever did).

Still, it's unusual to see a company with a long history of distinguished R&D in information-retrieval technology (Open Text was originally founded as a data-retrieval tech firm) remove itself from the search market in order to concentrate on ECM technologies.

Is this the beginning of a trend? Probably not. You shouldn't expect to see Oracle "EOL" the SES brand (or IBM ditch the OmniFind moniker, or Autonomy walk away from IDOL) any time soon. The search market is as robust as ever, and we don't expect other ECM titans to forgo their pieces of the search pie.

However, the Open Text experience does tend to show that doing "productized search" in depth is not a trivial undertaking. It's a complex product space and it requires serious commitments in terms of R&D, sales, support, and all the rest. Search is not something you "also offer." It's a first-class, tier one undertaking.

And that's how you, as a customer, should look at it too: Search is a complex problem space. Give it the attention it deserves (confront your needs head-on, without underestimating them), or walk away. There's no in-between.