The text technologies market 2: It’s actually in disarray
The text technologies market should be huge and thriving. Actually, however, it’s in disarray. Multiple generations of enterprise search vendors have floundered, with the Autonomy/Verity merger being basically a combination of the weak. The RDBMS vendors came up with decent hybrid tabular/text offerings, and almost nobody cared. (Admittedly, part of the reason for that is that the best offering was Oracle’s, and Oracle almost always screws up its ancillary businesses. Email searchability has been ridiculously bad since — well, since the invention of email. And speech technology has floundered for decades, with most of the survivors now rolled into the new version of Nuance.
Commercial text mining is indeed booming, but not to an extent that erases the overall picture of gloom. It’s at most a several hundred million dollar business, and one that’s highly fragmented. For example, at a conference on IT in life sciences not that long ago, two things became evident. First, the text mining companies were making huge, intellectually fascinating, life-saving contributions to medical research. Second, more than ten vendors were divvying up what was only around a $10 million market.
If text technology is going to achieve the prominence and prosperity it deserves, something dramatic has to change.
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