This IDC study updates our preliminary forecast for the search and discovery (content access tools) market of March 2006 and also provides vendor market shares for the top earning vendors.

"2005 was right on target with our 2004 market model," said Sue Feldman, IDC's VP for content technologies research. "The market for content access tools including search engines, text mining and analytics, categorizers, and other linguistically based technologies exhibited growth of more than 32% in 2005. That's extraordinary growth by any measure. The market explosion is due to drivers like compliance, but also to the demand for a single, unified access point to information in separate enterprise silos."