But what about other enterprise users? Some 80% of the information in the typical enterprise is now unstructured, including texts, emails, blogs and videos, and that percentage is rising, according to Gartner. All of this data potentially holds value, and today every website is expected to query and produce relevant results as fast as the best Internet search engines. “People need search technology [in] virtually everything they do today. Everybody thinks search [capability] is going to be embedded in everything,” says Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner.
Right now, most organizations have very constrained search capabilities, which are usually based on SQL queries or specific forms or reports. “That paradigm is soon going to break because the amount of data is just too big, and it’s happening much too quickly in a 24/7 environment,” he adds.