Accelerating Take-up of Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise

It was a pleasure to present the results from the quantitative demand-side research of the Value-IT project at the IKS Early-adopters workshop in June , with an audience of enthusiastic adopters and providers of Open Source technologies using Semantic Technologies in the Content Management area.

Our study produced evidence of increasing awareness of STE (Semantic Technologies for Enterprise); in our survey of 625 IT decision makers across Europe, 41% at least recognise the term “Semantic Technology”. There is much less awareness and understanding of how Semantic Technologies are actually used in the Enterprise. We discovered a growing number of pilot projects and innovative applications of STE by early adopters - for example companies in the Life Sciences sector (pharmaceuticals) are piloting STE to improve time-to-market. The challenge for STE suppliers is to expand the base of useful applications across many applications and industry sectors.

The Value-IT survey questioned IT decision makers about the top challenges they face, to test where Semantic Technology capabilities are relevant in the Enterprise. Interoperability ranks as the top priority for Enterprise IT; searching/linking information and collaboration rank next in importance – all are top priority (important, or very important) for more than half the companies we interviewed. As companies seek to achieve knowledge integration, they are attempting to build interoperable databases, driving a growing market for data integration solutions that Semantic Technologies can support. Many enterprise IT departments are looking for the kinds of features and capabilities that STE can deliver – for improved operational performance, to begin to get control of the high cost of large-scale information and knowledge management, and to support Enterprise innovation. At the same time, STE represents a true “paradigm shift” in the way big data and data heterogeneity are managed, with all the constraints and hurdles that implies.

The components of an STE market exist and the Value-IT study is cautiously optimistic about its prospects; OVUM has estimated that over the next five years Semantic Technologies could drive total spending for STE-enhanced Enterprise IT solutions in the range of €3.3B. While prospects for a sustained STE standalone-product market are poor, the potential for embedding STE in Enterprise solutions - such as content management - is very robust. The Value-IT findings are based on a number of face-to-face interviews with IT buyers and decision-makers, and a large-scale pan-European telephone survey (625 respondents) covering six industry sectors. All results are presented in the Value-IT-D3.2 - Final Demand driven Mapping Report and the Value-IT-D2.1 Technovision Report.

Blog by Maria Eugenia (Xenia) Beltrán and Rose Lockwood, International Consultants, Inmark Estudios y Estrategias