Sue Feldman and the team over at IDC are talking about a new category / trend called search-based applications, and I think they may well be onto something.
Because I believe that IDC puts real thought and rigor into definitions, I pay attention when I see them attempting to define something. From past experience, IDC was about 10 years ahead of the market in predicting the convergence of BI and enterprise applications with — even in the mid 1990s — a single analyst covering both ERP and BI.
Here’s how IDC describes search-based applications.
Search-based applications combine search and/or text analytics with collaborative technologies, workflow, domain knowledge, business intelligence, or relevant Web services. They deliver a purpose-designed user interface tailored to support a particular task or workflow. Examples of such search-based applications include e-Discovery applications, search marketing/advertising dashboards, government intelligence analysts’ workstations, specialized life sciences research software, e-commerce merchandising workbenches, and premium publishing subscriber portals in financial services or healthcare.
There are many investigative or composite, text- and data-centric analysis activities in the enterprise that are candidates for innovative discovery and decision-support applications. Many of these activities are carried out manually today. Search-based applications provide a way to bring automation to a broad range of information worker tasks.
Some vendors are jumping whole hog into the nascent category. For example, French Internet and enterprise search vendor Exalead has jumped in with both feet, making search-based applications a key war cry in their marketing. In addition, Exalead’s chief science officer, Gregory Grefenstette, seems a like match to the “Ggrefen” credited in Wikipedia with the creation of the search-based applications page.
Another vendor jumping in hard is Endeca, with the words “search applications” meriting the largest font on their homepage.
While you could argue that this is yet-another, yet-another focus for Endeca, clearly the folks in marketing — at least — are buying into the category.
At Mark Logic, we are not attempting to redefine ourselves around search-based applications. Our product is an XML server. Our vision is to provide infrastructure software for the next generation of information applications. We believe that search-based applications are one such broad class of information applications. That is, they are yet another class of applications that are well suited for development on MarkLogic Server.
So, if you’re thinking about building something that you consider a search-based application, then be sure to include us on your evaluation list.
