This release in the Infosphere research report series is a practical guide to Unstructured Information Management system. This report discusses the current software market for Unstructured Information Management products. It is intended as a tutorial and market guide on how to select a solution suitable for dealing with unstructured textual information. The current state of the market is evaluated and recommendations are given on which types of systems are most suitable for different tasks.

This is probably the most comprehensive market overview available. The report includes a technical and market discussion, and detailed business profiles of 40 selected vendors from all over the world.

A growing market

There are many factors contributing to this of market growth. We believe that the most important factors that will continue to drive this market forward are:

• Cheap hardware and the information explosion launch the enterprise search market.
• Intranets and enterprise portals broaden the reach of search & retrieval.
• Information retrieval is moving beyond simple text searches.
• Users demand more advanced search tools.
• Search is no longer just a component of content management.
• Extranet search applications reach a larger addressable market.
• The need to locate and integrate information enterprise-wide.
• More accurate and efficient searches encourage more searching.
• Fast, accurate searches create a virtuous circle.
• Enterprises seek a single supplier for their entire search needs.
• Taking advantage of the emerging Federal Government Intelligence and Security opportunities.

A promise of significant benefits

In this report, we analyze the current market situation for tools aiming to increase the value added by knowledge workers. The solutions incorporate Unstructured Information Management features as well as some more traditional Information and Content Management tools.

The vendors of the tools claim they provide users with several significant benefits like the ability to:

• Store and retrieve documents
• Broaden the scope and monitor parallel research areas
• Digest and add relevant new knowledge from the daily inflow
• Quickly navigate through vast amounts of information and zoom in on important pieces
• Share and disseminate both information and knowledge to peers
• Intelligently sort and route incoming e-mail or other documents
• Manage and create navigational structures in web sites
• Find related or similar work already created elsewhere in the organization
• Discover important trends or facts not previously known to the user
• Visualize complex structures
• View huge amounts of seemingly unrelated data and information with graphical tools in order to detect hidden links between related concepts

We believe that access to this kind of solution will, in many cases, lead to a significant knowledge boost for the users and their organizations. Since information overload is a common problem in many areas, benefits from this solution will be reusable not only in the one field but also throughout virtually any information intensive domain.

To summarize, the unstructured information management problems faced by most global organizations today are:

• Too much information in too many places
• End user search illiteracy
• Multilingual content
• Bringing context to information
• Increasing information volume means higher percentages of non-relevant hits
• Hits are links to pages rather then retrieval of precise data

If suitable tools doesn’t exist this it will lead to lower productivity, high frustration for users and very little leverage of information assets. This is already a considerable problem. Fortunately, there are some solutions to at least some of these problems, although no single vendor offers a solution for everything. This report will guide you to a vendor that can solve your information problems.