A couple of years back, we at New Idea Engineering wondered what sorts of trends could be gleened from these reports, so we set out to animate the Gartner quadrant a couple of years ago. In January, our annual review of the market, was the first pubic release of our animated Magic Quadrant.

We're happy to announce that we've updated our animated depiction of the last six years of Gartner positions for some of the top vendors we work with, which you can see on this page and read about on our enterprise search blog.

Autonomy, last year's highest vendor (defined as being closest to the upper right of the graphic), was overtaken this year by the combined FAST-Microsoft entry. Autonomy rank a bit above FAST-Microsoft on the "Completeness of Vision" axis, reflecting their overall corporate vision for enterprise search, and the richness of their product lines. But on the 'Ability to Execute" scale, which we believe maps into financial means, FAST-Microsoft pulls ahead.

Endeca, IBM, ZyLAB and Vivisimo complete the upper right quadrant, while Google moved to the right on the 'completeness' scale, and sits just on the line splitting the 'Challengers' from the 'Leaders' We found it odd that Google is not higher on the 'Ability to Execute' scale, especially since Steve Arnold's numbers put them above the others on that scale.

Some excellent search products fell off the list this year, as Gartner has changed their methodology. And some products with great potential just didn't meet all ofthe requremtns to get listed by Gartner. The products we feel should have been included on the report include Dieselpoint, SLI Systems, and X1 Technologies, as well as newcomer Attivio.

The article has more details: if your currrent search vendor cannot get you a copy, you can download it directly from Gartner.