We promised our attendees at the presentation “Enterprise and Desktop Search: Select, Deploy, Optimize and Leverage” that we would blog the answers to their questions. Here’s one:

Q. Will the search market consolidate around 3-4 vendors offering software as a service?

A. This is a fine question; let’s break it in two. First, about search as a software service. The ASP model for search is dynamite for public Web sites, where the data is inherently public (that’s the point of it, after all!) and where scale and traffic spikes are unpredictable. WebSideStory’s Atomz has made some serious business out of this market. S.L.I. Systems is interesting here as well. But the fact is that when data is private, or integration is necessary, enterprises aren’t ready for there to be an index that they cannot physically control, as we predicted several years ago. Even the mighty Google learned this to its chagrin, which is why it has introduced its deservedly successful Google Search Appliance. The index stays on a box in the control of the enterprise, and it’s destroyed when it’s done.

The second question is whether the market consolidates around three or four vendors, ASP or not. The assumption for a decade has been that this would be the case, and certainly there is ample precedent before you even get to sugary cola vendors. But as long as information access technology remains among the most interesting intellectual problems in the world, there will be more startups. I’m getting more and more new startups in my inbox, and next year we’ll have to consider including at Siderean and X1 and Exalead – newcomers all. So for 10 years the market has resisted consolidation, and I think it might hang in there for 10 more.