Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines

Published 12 December 2022 - ID G00748852 - 53 min read

By Analyst(s): Stephen Emmott, Anthony Mullen, David Pidsley, Tim Nelms

Initiatives: Artificial Intelligence; Digital Workplace Applications; Evolve Technology and
Process Capabilities to Support D&A

Insight engines combine search with composite AI to enable

context-enriched analysis, as well as the delivery of actionable
information, derived from all types of content and data within and
without an organization. This Magic Quadrant profiles 15 vendors
to help IT leaders make the best choice.

This Magic Quadrant is related to other research:

Critical Capabilities for Insight Engines

View All Magic Quadrants and Critical Capabilities

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines Insight Engines as follows: Insight engines apply relevancy methods to
discover, analyze, describe and organize content and data. They enable the interactive or
proactive delivery or synthesis of information to people, and data to machines, in the
context of their respective business moments.

Insight engines (IEs) draw data from a wide variety of sources and types — “wide data,”
including repositories, websites and databases — into a central index that can be queried.
Doing so enables insight engines to serve as a mediator for information to support
decision and action, or data to support automation. In this way, they enable search within
the enterprise or on websites, but also go beyond this to support higher levels of digital
experience such as answering questions, making contextual recommendations and
deriving insights.

“Relevancy methods” marshal composite AI to enrich content and data as it is indexed,

and expand queries as they are submitted to improve relevance. This involves a variety of
techniques (e.g., classification, summarization, entity extraction, intent detection, user-
telemetry-based collaborative filtering and personalization) and technologies (e.g.,
knowledge graphs, transformers and taxonomies).

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Insight engines model the context of both data and users to improve alignment between
the data that is available and the data that is needed, thereby optimizing productivity.
Insight engines have the following core capabilities:

■ Ingest content and data

■ Extract and enrich data

■ Deliver results to various touchpoints (UIs)

■ Evaluate and tune relevance

■ Secure operation

■ Flexible querying

Insight engines have the following optional capabilities:

■ Analyze result sets

■ Deploy with flexibility

■ Ease of use (for administrators and subject matter experts)

■ Multiple languages

■ Personalize experiences

(Bold capabilities are Critical Capabilities; see Critical Capabilities for Insight Engines.)

Insight engines should be viewed as platforms on which applications are provided,

developed or augmented by applying the capabilities listed above to specific employee
and customer experience use cases. Such applications are provided out of the box by
vendors (e.g., intranet or site search), developed through technical partnerships (e.g.,
search within third-party applications), developed with customers in-house (e.g., expert
finder), or developed through integration with third-party applications (e.g., extracting data
from documents to support RPA).

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Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

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Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Coveo

Coveo is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Coveo Relevance Cloud product is broadly
focused on both CX and EX applications, with heritage in customer support. Its operations
are mostly focused in North America, and its clients tend to be in communications, media
and services, manufacturing and natural resources, and healthcare providers.

Coveo continues to pursue the delivery of insight via third-party “in-app” experiences,
particularly to business roles, digital experience platforms (DXP) and digital commerce
platforms. Coveo’s recent acquisition of Qubit — a personalization engine — in October
2021 follows its acquisition of Tooso in 2019, reflecting an emphasis on developing the
application of ML to digital commerce in particular.

Strengths
■ Product or Service: Coveo leads this group in its approach in surfacing insights and
platform mechanics in third-party UI environments. It did so via both natively
designed “in the line of work” experiences — in platforms such as Salesforce and
ServiceNow — and API frameworks. The tooling to support the design of touchpoint
(UI) experiences is easy to use and easily supports developing engaging experiences.
Furthermore, Coveo offers the best level of personalization of all vendors in their
market. This requires low and episodic cost to maintain, underpinning its claim to be
“The Relevance Platform.”

■ Vertical/Industry Stragety: Coveo has broad coverage across most industry

verticals and is able to deliver key use cases to all of them in the areas of e-
commerce, service and support, workplace and consumer-facing websites. It is an
attractive platform industrywide and for horizontal adoption of IE technologies as
part of a broader digital workplace program.

■ Business Model: Coveo’s SaaS service, trials and strong developer experience help
with customer adoption and present minimal friction when getting started. This
makes Coveo a good tactical choice for buyers wanting a good customer
experience/employee experience (CX/EX) experience for popular use cases. Its
investment in Coveo Relevance delivers results to various touchpoints (UIs) and
provides users with personalized experiences.

Cautions

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■ Product or Service: Although Coveo has good capabilities in combining and
customizing ML approaches to their pipeline, it misses some opportunities to
connect these computational techniques to structural techniques and
representational methods (e.g., taxonomies, ontologies and graphs). As a result,
Coveo is not well-suited to play a role in managing and mastering concepts and
topics as enterprisewide metadata.

■ Geographic Strategy: In terms of the location of its offices, partners and customers,
Coveo’s presence is weighted to North America, beyond which it has customers in
Western Europe (including an operational footprint in the U.K. from its October 2021
acquisition of Qubit), with some in mature Asia/Pacific and partnerships expanding
to Greater China.

■ Product or Service: Coveo ranked lowest for the deploy with flexibility capability due
to its options being limited to multitenant SaaS. Coveo does not support on-
premises, hybrid and private cloud deployment options.

Elastic

Elastic is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Elastic Enterprise Search product is broadly
focused on both CX and EX applications, with particular emphasis on site search and
digital commerce. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in
communications, media and services, banking and securities, and manufacturing and
natural resources.

Elastic continues to develop its ability to connect to a broad range of data sources and the
contextual touchpoints (UIs) to deliver insight where work takes place. Elastic Kibana
analytics is best-in-class at analyzing result sets. Combined with the introduction and
development of ML-based natural language processing (NLP), Elastic is working to
expand its EX use cases while strengthening its CX capabilities.

Strengths
■ Innovation: With its strong open-source foundations, many competitors use Elastic
technology as part of their offerings. Elastic innovates in core search technology and
with business models by combining open-source developer community workflows
and ecosystems with its own commercial projects.

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■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Elastic is the largest vendor for revenue and employees by
some margin. It added 1,800 new customers during the review period and
experienced the highest growth. It remains to be seen whether Elastic’s easy-to-
understand pricing, based on infrastructure (storage and compute), will become the
industry norm.

■ Sales Strategy: Gartner rated Elastic the top vendor in this market for sales strategy,
which is well-balanced between direct and partner sales. A significant channel of
over 1,400 partners and a large direct sales team give Elastic a market reach
unrivaled by other vendors.

Cautions
■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: In terms of product variants and distribution of customer
base across industry verticals, Elastic lacks vertical offerings — an important
consideration for nondeveloper buyers. It has generic use cases like website, e-
commerce and workplace search but uneven coverage in different industries. Buyers
may need to look to Elastic partners for customization to verticals.

■ Market Understanding: Elastic’s understanding of insight engine use cases is

relatively immature, focusing more on external search rather than internal search
and insight applications. Although Elasticsearch is well-established, its insight
engine is still new with application to purpose evolving, as evidenced by lack of
detail in terms of the broadly framed use cases the vendor serves.

■ Offering (Product) Strategy: Elastic has begun to productize its offering and build
on its bottom-up approach driven by developer users. However, its broader vision for
search and the pivotal role it can play in the wider NLT market, and the positioning of
its product, are not as evident as others in this market. Although Elastic has made
great strides in the last year, it is still in the process of reaching feature parity with
respect to NLT.

EPAM

EPAM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its InfoNgen product is mainly focused on
EX applications, especially awareness and competitive intelligence. Its operations are
geographically diversified and its clients tend to be in communications, media and
services, manufacturing and natural resources, and banking and securities.

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EPAM is a publicly traded company with a wide geographical reach beyond the country
and region of its headquarters (Pennsylvania, U.S.), with operations across more than 100
offices in almost all regions. Leveraging its strengths in the use and provision of
taxonomies, EPAM is pursuing a hybrid approach to develop graph-based capabilities,
initially for representing company-specific data extracted from content sources.

Strengths
■ Market Understanding: EPAM demonstrates excellent understanding and clarity on
the use cases its InfoNgen product serves and buyer personas. With respect to use
cases, those for insight applications predominate, as well as serving internal search
and analysis of results for analytics.

■ Product or Service: EPAM has a robust semantic content (600,000 tagged entities
out of the box) with a text analytics engine and flexible NL pipeline at the heart of its
platform. EPAM can leverage media aggregation and external content/knowledge to
improve insights. The workflow for enrichment especially shines for industries
already modeled using their extensive semantic assets to attach metadata to
records and documents.

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: EPAM has high-quality product variants, templates and

accelerators for a number of industry use cases. These range from compliance,
banking, insurance, security and competitive intelligence to manufacturing, life
sciences and healthcare. Partners provide vertically focused marketing and
education, in addition to their reselling activities.

Cautions
■ Market Understanding: Despite a good understanding of this market in terms of use
cases and buyer personas, other markets — such as competitive intelligence — dilute
its focus on this market. In particular, its marketing strategy reflects poor awareness
of competitors and its differentiation from these.

■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Despite its long history, the product’s roadmap

reveals incremental enhancement rather than substantial change of capabilities.
EPAM’s reliance on its partner network and existing customer base to drive demand
for new customers is reflected in weak brand recognition in this market.

■ Sales Execution/Pricing and Sales Strategy: EPAM is principally a provider of

custom-made services to large enterprises drawn from their own customer
ecosystem. There is limited reach to new prospective customers. Unclear pricing and
weakness in partner network and revenue are further evidence of a lack of sales
strategy and execution.

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Expert.ai

Expert.ai is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Expert.ai Search product is mainly
focused on EX applications, especially transactional document search and open-sourced
intelligence. Its operations are mostly focused in Western Europe and its clients tend to be
in insurance, banking and securities, communications, and media and services.

Expert.ai is continuing its shift in the purpose and architecture of its product to a natural
language platform serving a broad range of NL-centric use cases, from knowledge-
representation via knowledge graphs to intelligent document processing. Among the
changes made, Elasticsearch is now being used as the core engine and index, added to
which are the capabilities derived from its product inventory.

Strengths
■ Offering (Product) Strategy: Expert.ai has a comprehensive and integrated suite of
tools for language automation, insights and knowledge representation. Its product,
NL Suite, provides a rich composite AI pipeline tool for extracting data from content
to support automation and knowledge discovery. The deep integration with search,
text analytics and its new Intelligent Document Processing offering is differentiating.

■ Business Model: Over half of Expert.ai revenue is for its SaaS product, which
provides a solid platform for growth and is a key enabler of its financial viability. It
has 35 direct sales representatives targeting enterprise accounts, which speaks of a
sound direct go-to-market strategy and a clear focus on large enterprise accounts.

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Expert.ai demonstrates a clear understanding of its

buyer personas in the market where deep linguistic analysis is needed. Expert.ai has
robust product variants, and its vertical go-to-market is focused on insurance,
banking and securities, communications, media and services, manufacturing and
natural resources, and government.

Cautions
■ Geographic Strategy: Operations are mostly in Western Europe, where the majority
of its 45 partners are located for the delivery of professional services, in addition to
their reselling activities, and a minority developing IP. It has a narrow geographical
reach beyond this and North America, where it also has offices and substantial
customer presence.

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■ Product or Service: Expert.ai has little to no ability to personalize experiences, in
contrast to all vendors in this market and the overall direction of this market in terms
of key trends. Personalization is a critical capability for success in this market, yet
there is no evidence from the roadmap that this is being improved.

■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Expert.ai is now focused on rearchitecting its

products as a platform for NL-based applications serving EX-purposes. Its poor
record of awareness of competitors and differentiators, ambiguity in its product
roadmap and expression of its current understanding of market trends reflects a
period of introspective transformation.

IBM

IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Watson Discovery product is broadly focused
on EX applications, especially knowledge management in the context of R&D and
transactional document search. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its
clients tend to be in communications, media and services, banking and securities, and
transportation.

IBM continues to develop its capabilities in deep document understanding, seeking to

position itself as a common platform for natural language use cases. A key focus on
those use cases is the ability to answer questions and do so in the context of
conversational interaction (e.g., using Watson Assistant).

Strengths
■ Market Understanding: IBM demonstrates the strongest and most complete
understanding of this market among the vendors reviewed. This is reflected in the
use cases its product serves, the buyers in both IT and business domains, and its
primary competitors. The approximately 175 employees in product development and
350 overall in this division suggest a skilled team sized to support IBM’s enterprise
customers.

■ Offering (Product) Strategy: Discovery has a seamless composition experience

allowing touchpoints to be designed using a flexible combination of search,
conversation and smart document understanding. Touchpoints can be designed to
not just service humans with insights but act as delivery packages of
insights/features for downstream automation and AI modeling. IBM offers a broad
connected vision in the insight engines space.

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■ Product or Service: The Smart Document Understanding functionalities are the
workhorse of the Watson Discovery extract/enrich workflow. It works very well, and
the clean low-code/no-code (LCNC) experience allows for quick results. The custom
“patterns” functionality allows for new classifiers (e.g., company performance
worthy of note) to be built easily. Basic models and classifiers are provided, but
Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is needed for emotions, categories
and concept enrichment. Enrichment modalities can be synchronous or
nonsynchronous API.

Cautions
■ Geographic Strategy: IBM has more than 1,400 partners across all regions, with
most in Western Europe, mature Asia/Pacific and North America. However, IBM
chose not to reveal the global distribution of its customer base for Watson Discovery
nor which of its regional offices support its insights engine. This may mean uneven
support or varying implementation expertise across regions and countries.
Prospective buyers should take note and query this when considering.

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Although IBM has doubled down on front-office

applications of its technology, it still relies on third-party system integrators to bring
industry and business unit skills and assets to projects. Although Watson Discovery
is powerful, buyers must invest time to stand up their industry language assets, even
with external professional support, to make the most of it. Those not committed to
this new style of topic/linguistic workflow will find product adoption challenging.

■ Business Model: IBM provides no financial breakdown for its insight engine revenue,
so it is difficult to assess whether Watson Discovery is performing above the general
trend in IBM’s performance and against the market as a whole. Customers should be
cautious given the opaqueness of IBM’s business model in this market.

IntraFind

IntraFind is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its iFinder product is mainly focused on
EX applications, especially for internal search across the enterprise in support of
knowledge management and the digital workplace. Its operations are mostly focused in
Western Europe, and its clients tend to be in manufacturing and natural resources,
government, and utilities.

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IntraFind is focused on the release of the sixth version of its product, iFinder. Central to the
product’s development is enabling employees to control the data sources across which
they can search and training language models that scale across high volumes of
enterprise content.

Strengths
■ Customer Experience: Reviews on the Gartner Peer Insights platform rate their
customer experience as best in this market. IntraFind does not have a traditional
user help desk team but provides excellent service quality through its professional
services organization. Selection and implementation, the quality of iFinder and its
solutions, and the vendor overall are all rated as very high, and IntraFind makes a
point of considering customer feedback in its product roadmap.

■ Overall Viability and Business Model: IntraFind has enjoyed growth above market
rate, but from a low base, and it was modestly profitable during the review period. A
strong employee-to-customer ratio suggests the business model can scale. This,
combined with a positive cash-to-debt ratio, made IntraFind one of the top-rated
vendors in this market for its business model.

■ Product or Service: IntraFind provides comprehensive templates for use cases

across business units, industries and workplace tools (e.g., Confluence, Outlook and
Microsoft 365). Templates are underpinned by semantic data, and deep machine-to-
machine integrations with companies like Semantic Web Company and Neo4j
allows for richer information architecture workflows.

Cautions
■ Offering (Product) Strategy: IntraFind’s roadmap seems incremental rather than
innovative, and in contrast to others in the group, it may not be moving as quickly in
adopting and maturing AI practices, such as enhancements in NLP. It also lacks
differentiation in this market. For example, iFinder has fallen back this year relative
to Leaders in this market in enabling users to analyze results sets. Its own
technology provides charts and prebuilt templates, but did not demonstrate
customizability or self-service analytics nor any inbuilt automated insights. Its data
modeling and content analytics are both limited.

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■ Marketing Strategy: Gartner rated IntraFind’s marketing strategy as one of the
weakest of the vendors reviewed. IntraFind’s value proposition was inconsistent
across its presentations and website, with the latter being marginally clearer. The
weak value proposition makes it difficult for buyers to identify IntraFind as a
possible solution to their needs and reduces opportunities for IntraFind to grow and
find new customers.

■ Marketing Execution: Intrafind is difficult to find in Google web rankings for insight
engines. Despite stated investments in web advertising, IntraFind’s brand recognition
beyond the vendor’s website is weak.

Lucidworks

Lucidworks is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Fusion product is broadly focused on
CX and EX applications, especially user behavior analytics, data discovery, question
answering (NLQ) based on deep learning techniques, and search in support of the digital
workplace. Its operations are mostly focused in North America, and its clients tend to be in
communications, media and services, retail, and government.

Lucidworks continues to maintain Fusion as two separate stacks for on-premise/single-

tenant and SaaS/multitenant deployments. As well as parity of features between these,
the focus of development is on enhancement of personalization — especially in support
of CX.

Strengths
■ Market Understanding: Lucidworks clearly articulates its understanding of its
buyers. This depth of understanding reflects the vendors’ historical and current
ability to engage with client needs across a range of business domains, roles and
purposes to develop solutions aligned to myriad use cases.

■ Product or Service: Relevance is critical for success with insight engines, and
Lucidworks scored joint highest in this Magic Quadrant in our assessment of the
evaluation and tuning of relevance. Lucidworks’ approach shifts the emphasis from
administrators to subject matter experts by automating much of the work using
KPIs, supervised learning and business-facing tools.

■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Lucidworks demonstrates, jointly with two other

vendors, the most comprehensive view of the trends reflecting and influencing the
insight engines’ market. This positions Lucidworks well in terms of ensuring its
product remains relevant to buyers needs.

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Cautions
■ Business Model: Lucidworks often requires proof of concept projects, which may
limit growth because this creates barriers to product adoption that may not scale for
mainstream businesses who need a commoditized product. This is especially so
because their solutions, based on an Apache Solr legacy, tend to be service and
presales intensive.

■ Product or Service: In particular, the experience for building touchpoints (UIs) is very
basic and feels pedestrian. It suggests a lack of the broader vision for touchpoints
(UIs) that is expected in the insight engine market, where other solutions are evolving
to be highly flexible, language-centric workbenches.

■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Modest increases in the customer base suggests growth is

mostly from existing customers. This is in part due to weakness in its marketing
strategy, epitomized by its campaign around “delightful experiences in the moment.”
This is a weak message for buyers, which appears to be inconsistent with its other
messaging across vendor presentations and its website.

Micro Focus

Micro Focus is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its IDOL product is mainly focused on
EX applications, including search within the context of intranet and extranet. Its
operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in government, banking
and securities, communications, and media and services.

Micro Focus is working on bringing graph-based capabilities to the heart of IDOL, in

support of conceptual reasoning, and the induction of new facts from those that are
extracted. This is coupled with the goal to support cloud-based deployments, starting with
AWS.

Strengths
■ Marketing Strategy and Execution: The Micro Focus marketing strategy has a
strong focus on the needs of industry, OEMs and platform buyers, which is a unique
combination in this market. A value proposition focused on strengths in video, image
and natural language processing was strongly differentiated from competitors. IDOL
continues to have strong brand recognition in the insight engine market and is
consistently ranked top of Google searches. A marketing focus on customer wins
and case studies demonstrates strength and confidence in the customer base. In
addition, a focus on government is a key differentiation in this market.

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■ Overall Viability: We assess Micro Focus to be the second largest vendor in this
market and its customer base to be the largest. There are few who operate at this
size and scale in this market, and Micro Focus stands out in this respect from its
competition.

■ Offering (Product): Micro Focus has a broad set of tools and prebuilt components,
especially in the analytics area and in support for real-time streamed rich media.
This is complemented by a rich set of supporting data repositories and ontologies
resulting in more than 500 search/analytics functions. Its addition of a virtual
assistant layer and strong capabilities around fact modeling and veracity makes the
solution a powerful tool for assisting researchers and analysts.

Cautions
■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Despite a long and clearly documented product
history and clarity on its roadmap going forward, Micro Focus does not demonstrate
strong awareness of the key market trends that reflect and drive this market. This
reflects IDOL’s direction being driven by its current rather than prospective customer
base.

■ Business Model: Micro Focus experienced negative growth for the business as a
whole in the review period and provides no breakdown for this market segment. A
failure to grow, capture market share and generate profits speaks to weaknesses in
Micro Focus’ underlying business model.

■ Product Variants: Although Micro Focus has a huge number of partners, they are
mostly channel partners and do not build solutions on top of the core platform.
Micro Focus could do more to co-innovate with customers and partners.

Microsoft

Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Microsoft Search and Azure Cognitive
Search products are broadly focused on EX and CX applications for digital workplace
search and custom applications, respectively. Its operations are geographically diversified,
and its clients tend to be in government, manufacturing and natural resources, and retail.

Microsoft is working to improve its semantic search capabilities across both Microsoft
Search (integrated into M365) and Azure Cognitive Search (its alternative for custom-
made solutions). Project Turing is Microsoft’s own transformer-based capability — other
alternatives being BERT and GPT-3 — that underpins its semantic search capabilities,
along with other capabilities provided via Azure Cognitive Services, from which the
product’s name is derived.

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Strengths
■ Operations: Microsoft has received the highest and most consistent reviews from its
customers when it comes to the efficacy of its postdeployment services. Microsoft
365’s integration and stability across office suites worldwide underscore the volume
and demand that Microsoft Search can handle for day-to-day operations within the
scope of its offering.

■ Sales Execution/Pricing and Strategy: Microsoft Search is included in Microsoft 365

pricing across all tiers, which makes it easy for customers to buy and is a seamless
part of Microsoft’s sales motion for digital workplace solutions. Azure Cognitive
Search is based on an infrastructure-plus cost model based on core Azure pricing.
Microsoft’s global sales capability and go-to-market (GTM) model, which is focused
on enterprise, corporate and SMB, gives it access to a large potential customer base
for Microsoft 365 Search and Azure Cognitive Search. Taking into consideration the
growth of Microsoft 365 business, Microsoft Search is estimated to now be used by
over 250 million end users. Microsoft’s global footprint, combined with streamlined
activation for developers, its channel for smaller customers and enterprise account
teams for larger accounts, makes it a formidable competitor in this market.

■ Marketing Strategy: Microsoft showed a strong and differentiated marketing

strategy focused on the needs of users of the Microsoft 365 portfolio with Microsoft
Search while providing more sophisticated enterprise search features with Azure
Cognitive Search.

Cautions
■ Product or Service: Extraction and enrichment of data is not straightforward, with
Microsoft’s offerings at two ends of the spectrum. Microsoft Search offers a light
touch and minimal pipeline. Azure Cognitive Search’s API approach can leverage its
Cognitive Services, but without a design environment, it is up to the developer to
provide the scaffolding to the pipeline.

■ Product or Service: Microsoft Search offers no manual ability to evaluate relevance

and only limited manual ability to tune, therefore attaining the lowest level of
capability in this Magic Quadrant. Evaluating and tuning relevance is a significant
burden for organizations, yet essential for attaining relevance and therefore success.
With Microsoft Search, Microsoft relieves customers of this burden through
automation.

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■ Product or Service: Azure Cognitive Search does not provide built-in personalization,
which we consider key to providing the most relevant experiences. Rather, it provides
developers the tools to contextualize search results (e.g., “tag boosting”). As such,
Azure Cognitive Search, together with Expert.ai, received the lowest score in this
Magic Quadrant for this capability.

Mindbreeze

Mindbreeze is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its InSpire product is broadly focused on
EX applications, including expertise finding and entity 360 search. Its operations are
mostly focused in Western Europe, and its clients tend to be in government,
communications, media and services, and banking and securities.

Mindbreeze continues to develop its OEM strategy, using InSpire to support third-party
products and services. In pursuit of this, Mindbreeze has prepackaged insight services (for
the ingestion of content) and insight applications (for delivery to recurring use case
patterns).

Strengths
■ Customer Experience: Reviewers on the Gartner Peer Insights platform rate
Mindbreeze as delivering this market’s highest level of customer experience when it
comes to selection and implementation, and with InSpire as a product and the
vendor’s solution. This translates into customer loyalty, as demonstrated by a very
high renewal rate and low customer churn.

■ Product or Service: Mindbreeze provides an excellent choice of prebuilt templates

with not just UI components, but also preconfigured semantic assets, AI classifiers
and content integrations. It has good use of NLP to parse content (text, docs) to
support further analysis and drill-down detail.

■ Innovation: Mindbreeze has a good ecosystem strategy spanning OEM deals, well-
incentivized partner networks, flexible reseller deals, system integrators and custom
approaches for government. Its approach of providing insights as microservices
further stimulates its use in composable business.

Cautions

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■ Market Understanding: Although the vendor demonstrates relevant use cases
across a broad range of functional domains, the vendor’s understanding of this
market is diminished by a lack of clarity on its target buyers, especially at a senior
level. This is important to expansion within organizations and across functional
domains, thereby consolidating position and purpose.

■ Operations: Despite customer reviews demonstrating strong customer experience,

Mindbreeze has the most variation of sentiment from users on the efficacy of
postdeployment services in comparison to others in this group. This diminishes its
scores for operations.

■ Geographic Strategy: Although strong overall, Mindbreeze’s physical presence

beyond its home country of Austria is limited to two geographic regions: Western
Europe and North America. Although comparable to the majority of vendors in this
market, it underlines the importance of working with partners.

SearchBlox

SearchBlox is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its SearchBlox Enterprise Search
product is broadly focused on CX and EX applications, including site search and intranet
search. Its operations are mostly focused in North America, and its clients tend to be in
banking and securities, government, and healthcare providers.

SearchBlox chooses to separate out its AI-based capabilities as a parallel product stream
called SearchAI, which modifies the behavior of its core product, SearchBlox. As well as
recently releasing the tenth and latest version of the product, SearchBlox continues to
develop its suite of SearchAI additions, the latest being PreText NLP.

Strengths
■ Product or Service: SearchBlox demonstrates a wide range of options for
deployment, including SaaS for e-commerce.

■ Business model: Self-service support for e-commerce search provides a low-friction

entry to the SearchBlox offering.

■ Responsiveness/Record: SearchBlox demonstrates a good understanding of the

trends affecting this market. Its offering (product) strategy positions it as a search
engine with the ability to deliver insights through its SearchAI capabilities. This is
attractive when replacing an incumbent solution, plus it allows the option to pursue
higher aspirations later without replatforming.

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Cautions
■ Product or Service: SearchBlox has by far the most basic approach in this Magic
Quadrant to delivering results to different touchpoints (UIs) around the business. It
has very few prebuilt integrations and UI accelerators outside of basic web,
commerce and email templates.

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: SearchBlox provides no real evidence of a strategy

targeting verticals or business units. It has patchy presence across business units,
and outside of banking, government and retail big spaces, there seems to be few
industry-crafted solutions or domain expertise modeled.

■ Market Understanding: SearchBlox is on a journey from a vendor delivering search

to one delivering insight, as demonstrated by the vendor’s understanding of this
market. This lags behind competitors, notably in terms of the range of use cases to
which the product is applied and the buyers seeking to address those use cases.

Sinequa

Sinequa is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Sinequa Intelligent Search Platform
product is mainly focused on EX applications, including search for the enterprise and R&D.
Its operations are mostly focused in North America and Western Europe, and its clients
tend to be in manufacturing and natural resources, banking and securities, and
government.

Sinequa has long been deployable only to on-premises/private cloud but is now available
as a SaaS-based solution and will continue to develop deployment options to the cloud,
starting with Microsoft Azure. In addition, the vendor continues to increase its use of ML-
based NLP to complement traditional rule-based approaches.

Strengths
■ Market Understanding: Sinequa has a strong grasp of this market, especially given
that this is the only market within which the vendor competes. In particular, the
vendor’s understanding of buyers and their needs is the strongest of all vendors in
this Magic Quadrant.

■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Sinequa demonstrated the strongest linkage

between market trends, product history and product roadmap. The vendor has a
solid grasp of the market’s direction and what it needs to do to align its product
accordingly.

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■ Product or Service: Sinequa leads the market in the capability of its product to
personalize experiences. This enables the context to extend to a user’s journey by
leveraging the combination of rich implicit and explicit cues with minimal (low cost
and episodic) burden on clients.

Cautions
■ Marketing Strategy: Sinequa does not clearly communicate the value proposition of
its product. The messaging behind this is generic and does not resonate with the
needs of its intended buyers, who are often large/global with unique, innovation-
driven and complex knowledge-intensive needs, many of whom are migrating to
cloud. Buyers confused by its co-selling strategy with Microsoft — which offers two
insight engine products of its own — should consider Sinequa’s verticalized
solutions, Teams and SharePoint integrations, and data residency options.

■ Marketing Execution: Although long-established, Sinequa’s brand has yet to attain a

prominent position in the considerations of prospective buyers. Its efforts to elevate
this fall short of the visibility needed to stand out from the crowd, especially among
the notable competitors with whom they share a presence in the Leader’s Quadrant.

■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Customer growth is a cause for concern compared with

other vendors in this market, and Sinqua was one of the lowest scoring for this
metric. Sinequa was also ranked poorly for customer satisfaction with pricing.

S&P Global

S&P Global is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Goldfire product is mainly
focused on EX applications, especially in research/technology trend analysis,
understanding IP, and competitor assessment. Its operations are geographically
diversified, and its clients tend to be in manufacturing and natural resources, education,
and transportation:

S&P Global is rearchitecting Goldfire with a view to being more modular and flexible in
terms of customization. This will enable greater use of ML-based approaches to NLP,
alongside rule-based approaches, and increased personalization in the future.

Strengths

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■ Offering (Product) Strategy: S&P Global scales its offering through a large network
of solution providers. It enables providers with a broad set of prebuilt functions and
self-serve capabilities across data, technology, channel, content and strategic
partners. Extensive data partnerships and the use of semantic tools enable an
accelerator approach to kick-start implementations for industry and business unit
use cases.

■ Geographic Strategy: S&P Global has the widest geographical reach in this market,
well beyond its New York, U.S. headquarters. The Goldfire customer base is globally
distributed with a substantial customer presence and multiple offices in mature
Asia/Pacific, North America, Western Europe, Greater China and Latin America, where
it has seen strong growth in its customer base.

■ Customer Experience: Customer feedback indicates that reviewers rate their

customer experience of the quality of Goldfire and its solutions as very good, and
highly rate customer experience of the vendor overall, as they did in years previous.

Cautions
■ Innovation: S&P Global has not yet taken the opportunity to foster a wider digital
ecosystem for innovation. Goldfire is not present in third-party marketplaces, has no
grass roots programs with developers and shows little evidence of co-innovation
with third parties such as partners on core research areas such as natural language
technologies.

■ Product or Service: Unlike other vendors in this market, S&P Global works directly
with clients to create the connectors they need. This means fewer connectors
developed by the vendor overall, and no third-party involvement in even a proportion
of connectors. This means a smaller library of connectors and a more limited
framework for custom development by customers or others.

■ Vertical Industry Strategy: S&P Global lacks a partner ecosystem or large workforce
for insight engines to expand to address other verticals, and its industry domain
knowledge coverage limits opportunities to grow. It has a deep presence in R&D
departments, which is important for the verticals it covers. However, it could do more
to expand beyond servicing existing industries and empower partners to expand
domain knowledge, thus leaving S&P Global able to focus on the core underlying
platforms and not the day to day for clients.

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Squirro

Squirro is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its Squirro Insight Engine product is mainly
focused on EX applications, including insight into sales, service and risk. Its operations
are mostly focused in Western Europe, and its clients tend to be in banking and securities,
insurance, and manufacturing and natural resources.

Squirro takes an ML-centric approach to NLP during the ingestion pipeline and query
processing. In order to leverage subject matter expertise within organizations, it is
developing a marketplace for customers to share insight applications, models, and other
components, plus a knowledge graph to support explicit management of data.

Strengths
■ Innovation: Squirro has built a healthy ecosystem for innovation and build partners,
realized in the form of a marketplace designed to exchange apps, ML models and
connectors. It is also present in other marketplaces. It also actively connects
ecosystem partners with AI masterclasses and has a mature Squirro Executive
Advisory Council. The AI Studio component provides a focal point for custom model
creation enabling business analysts, data analysts and data scientists to rapidly
develop artificial intelligence and machine learning models through a user-friendly
visual interface.

■ Offering (Product) Strategy: As evidenced by the work in its AI Studio and a modular
approach to insight engine architecture, Squirro shows a clear path to how it is
evolving its platform to be a more comprehensive language and insights automation
platform. Roadmap items confirm this focus by including more features around
ModelOps and the addition of more semantic capabilities to improve enrichment
and permit greater reuse of assets.

■ Product or Service: Squiro provides a full range of deployment options including on-
premises, hybrid and self-service SaaS. To extract and enrich data, Squirro
demonstrates flexibility in building custom pipelines using AI Studio as the hub for
model development activity. The UI experience is simple and clear to use while still
exposing powerful document mining, data labeling and train/test features.

Cautions
■ Operations: Squirro is in the bottom three of vendors in terms of the number of
industries supported and has the lowest number of customers. As Insight Engines
and other related natural language markets begin to consolidate, Squirro must
ensure it can onboard new clients and use cases quickly and rapidly make users
more autonomous.

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■ Product or Service: Although the product demonstrates both its capability to deliver
results to various touchpoints and a good user experience for the composition of
those touchpoints (UIs), there is not yet a rich library of templates to construct
touchpoints.

■ Marketing Execution: Despite being identified as a competitor by some of the other

vendors in this market, Squirro has yet to attain comparable presence in terms of the
considerations of prospective buyers. There is therefore scope for improvement in
Squirro’s marketing execution so as to reach and engage a wider base of customers.

Squiz

Squiz is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Funnelback product is mainly focused
on CX applications, especially search within the context of websites (i.e., “site search”). Its
operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in government,
education and insurance.

The switch from trading as Funnelback to Squiz Funnelback represents further alignment
to the vendor’s parent, Squiz, and renewed focus on the support of DXP-centric purposes.
Key developments on the roadmap include greater integration with the Squiz DXP and
support for marketing technology in this context.

Strengths
■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Squiz Funnelback saw strong growth in new customers
during the review period. Funnelback’s simple pricing model may be an influencing
factor in this growth.

■ Product or Service: Funnelback limits the burden of evaluating and tuning relevance
by employing supervised machine learning to autotune results. Although this does
not shift the burden from administrators to subject matter experts like others in this
market with higher scores, it does reduce the burden on administrators.

■ Marketing Strategy: Squiz presents a clear value proposition around DXP with
search as a component. However, the lack of focus on search potentially puts it at a
disadvantage against other insight engine vendors.

Cautions

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■ Marketing Execution: Gartner rated Funnelback poorly for brand awareness, web
presence beyond the vendor’s website and marketing investments. Evidence
suggests that the Funnelback brand is not well-recognized in this market and that it
is difficult for customers to identify. Customers should be concerned by
Funnelback’s ability to create a long-term brand, which can attract new customers.

■ Vertical Industry/Strategy: Its go-to-market focuses on direct sales in government

(e.g., state, federal and local), education (e.g., higher education) and insurance.
Although Funnelback has presence across industries, its specialization is really in
three core business units: communications, IT and marketing. With a relatively lower
number of employees for this group and a focus on direct sales rather than partners,
there will be limits to the depth of industry customization possible with the current
operational and product focus Squiz has.

■ Product or Service: Funnelback has been designed to work as a hosted private cloud
and launched its SaaS product in the U.S. and Australia, and via its Squiz Experience
Cloud (PaaS). The vendor claims support for the full range of deployment options,
but did not substantially demonstrate these, so scored poorly in Gartner’s
assessment for this criterion.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a
result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over
time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not
necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a
reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a
change of focus by that vendor.

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a
result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over
time. A vendor’s appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not
necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a
reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, of changed evaluation criteria, or of a
change of focus by that vendor.

Added
■ SearchBlox

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Dropped
■ Google: Since the previous update to this Magic Quadrant, Google withdrew its
stand-alone insight engine product from the market. Cloud Search is now tightly
coupled to its Google Workspace with G Suite Business and Enterprise editions. It is
not available without a Google Workspace license. Cloud Search includes
connectors to many Google services and third-party data sources.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, vendors and their products must meet the
following criteria.

Vendors must:

■ Earn revenue directly attributable to their product in the calendar year 2020 that is at
least $12 million OR $7 million with at least 20% growth compared to the calendar
year 2019.

■ Have active customers within their customers base that meet the following:

■ Sold the product to at least 10 new enterprise customers (logos) in the calendar
year 2020. Each must have been retained as customers and have successfully
deployed their product for operational use by employees before 1 September
2021.

■ More than 5% of customers, plus either offices or partners, in each of two or

more major geographic regions, including either North America or Europe, the
Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

■ More than 5% of customers in each of five or more vertical/industry categories.

Products must:

■ Be offered as a separately billed, stand-alone product.

■ Be generally available for deployment by enterprise clients before 1 September 2021

(i.e., actively marketed to new clients and used in production by existing clients).

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■ Meet the market definition: Insight engines are systems that apply relevancy
methods to discover, describe, organize and analyze content and data. They enable
existing or synthesized information to be delivered proactively or interactively to
digital workers, customers and others in the context of their business moments.

■ Serve at least two of the four principal use cases, specifically: internal (employee)
search and insight applications.

■ Support the following capabilities:

■ Use connectors to access and gather content and data of diverse types from
multiple sources other than — but may also include — those provided by the
vendor.

■ Create an index (data source) by intelligently processing gathered

content/data, and make this available via intelligent query through multiple
touchpoints (UIs; for humans) and integrations (for machines).

■ Create and provide new touchpoints (UIs; for humans) and programmatic
interfaces (for machines).

■ Enable the relevance of results — the content and data returned in response to
queries — to be tuned, either manually, automatically, or both.

■ Enable system administration to ensure its effective provision and

maintenance, including by subject matter experts and business users.

In addition, products must not meet the following criterion, and will be excluded if they do.

■ Products that are used to store source content and data for life cycle management —
in addition to information retrieval and data syndication (i.e., content services
platforms or applications are excluded from this research).

These criteria differ from those of the previous version of this Magic Quadrant in terms of:

■ Changes to the revenue thresholds, up from $8 million and $6 million to $12 million
and $7 million respectively

■ Addition of criterion for new customers in 2020

■ Additional constraints on customer presence in geographies and industries

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■ Discontinuing the exception that stand-alone products can be part of a “cloud office
platform intended to support knowledge workers in all roles”

■ Revised cut-off date for general availability of products to 1 September 2021

■ The addition of three product-specific capabilities addressing the creation of

touchpoints (UIs) and integrations, relevancy tuning, and system administration

■ The addition of exclusion criterion.

This is in addition to regrouping the criteria into vendor-specific and product-specific lists.

Honorable Mentions
■ Amazon Web Services: AWS brought its fully managed enterprise search offering,
Amazon Kendra, to market in 2020. Amazon Kendra is a SaaS-based product that
leverages AWS’ own NLP technology with a focus on natural language question and
answer across unstructured content. The vendor meets many of the criteria for
inclusion, notably the product capabilities. However, adoption of Amazon Kendra did
not, at the time of assessment, meet the threshold for inclusion with respect to the
geographic spread of customers. At that time, Kendra only supported English, but
since October 2021, it now supports 35 languages.

■ Aiimi: A long-established professional services provider, Aiimi has productized its

Elasticsearch-based services in the form of the Aiimi Insight Engine. Among its
additions to the Elasticsearch core is ML-enriched processing of content and data to
support semantic search capabilities. The vendor’s product aligns with the
capabilities of an insight engine as detailed in the inclusion criteria, but it has yet to
be formally evaluated against the inclusion and exclusion criteria for this Magic
Quadrant.

Evaluation Criteria
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on many factors. These include the
quality and efficacy of the processes, systems and methods that enable performance to
be competitive, efficient and effective. Ultimately, technology providers are judged on their
ability to capitalize on their vision and their success in doing so.

Ability to Execute
The standard Gartner criteria used to assess Ability to Execute are applied to this market
as follows, with weightings given in the table below.

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■ Product or Service: Seven critical capabilities are assessed, namely: analyze result
sets, ingest content and data, deploy with flexibility, extract and enrich data, deliver
results to various touchpoints (UIs), evaluate and tune relevance, and personalize
experiences.

■ Overall Viability: A vendor’s financial viability, the size of its business and investment
in its product.

■ Sales Execution/Pricing: Vendors’ pricing models; loss, retention and gain of

customers; and customer satisfaction with negotiation of pricing.

■ Market Responsiveness/Record: Market trends, product roadmap, and product

history.

■ Marketing Execution: Brand awareness among prospective buyers, web presence of

brand beyond the vendor’s website and marketing investments.

■ Customer Experience: Customer experience of selection and implementation,

customer experience of quality of product and solution, and customer experience of
the vendor.

■ Operations: Allocation of staff across business function domains, efficacy of

services, organizational structure and dependence on third-parties.

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Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

Completeness of Vision
The standard Gartner criteria used to assess Completeness of Vision are applied to this
market as follows, with weightings given in the table below.

■ Market Understanding: Clarity on use cases served and relative priorities, buyer
personas and relative priorities, and awareness of competitors and differentiators.

■ Marketing Strategy: Clearly communicates value proposition through messaging,

value proposition addressing the needs of buyers and consistency of value
proposition throughout messaging.

■ Sales Strategy: Sales strategies to reach prospective customers, impact of partner

network on revenue and impact of direct sales on revenue.

■ Offering (Product) Strategy: Principal points of differentiation from competitors,

coherence and vision of product portfolio, and development of product variants by
third-parties.

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■ Business Model: Impact of the business model on financial position/health, impact
of the business model on vendor’s growth, and drivers and resistors to product
adoption.

■ Vertical/Industry Strategy: Distribution of customer base across industry verticals,

product variants, and distribution of industry domain knowledge across your staff
and partners.

■ Innovation: Incorporation of third-party functionality, participation within a wider

digital ecosystem of “build” partners, and co-innovation with customers and
partners.

■ Geographic Strategy: Geographical reach beyond the country and region of HQ(s);
geographical reach across indirect channels; and global distribution of customer
base.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Low

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation Medium

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

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Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders demonstrate a strong understanding of the insight engine market, especially in
terms of understanding their competitors and differentiation and communicating their
value proposition clearly and consistently. They have the sales and geographic strategy,
particularly across indirect channels, to exploit their marketing effectively. Offering
products that demonstrate strength across all critical capabilities bar extracting and
enriching data, they have strong overall viability, sales execution and operations.
Customers praise their experiences of Leaders’ products or services, and of the vendors
themselves. However, potential customers should note that a Leader is not always the
best choice. A smaller, more focused vendor could potentially provide excellent support
for, and commitment to, individual needs.

Challengers
Challengers have strong business models that support comprehensible and competitive
pricing models, but struggle to drive adoption. They have a strong geographic reach in
terms of customer base but limited presence, directly or indirectly. Their products or
services demonstrate strength across a range of critical capabilities (although not as
many as Leaders). Challengers also have strong overall viability, sales execution and
operations. Although their market understanding and strategy falls short of that of
Leaders, as does their marketing execution, they demonstrate excellent market
responsiveness and record. Customers praise their experiences of Challengers’ products
and services, and of the vendors themselves, although they fall behind Leaders in terms of
selection and implementation. Challengers are usually a good choice for large, horizontal
enterprise initiatives. They should be assessed alongside Leaders for such initiatives.

Visionaries
Visionaries combine a strong product offering with strength in innovation. They align well
with industry needs and have the sales strategy needed to fulfill them. Visionaries offer
products that demonstrate competence across a range of critical capabilities, with
particular strengths in some key areas, notably extraction and enrichment of data and
deployment with flexibility. However, they lack the level of overall viability that Leaders
and Challengers possess, and they tend to lag in sales execution despite strong marketing
execution. Visionaries are suitable for organizations looking to modernize and transform
themselves by tackling familiar problems in new ways. Prospective customers should,
however, check whether these vendors can scale their services to meet the demands of
large international projects with broad horizontal use-case requirements.

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Niche Players
Niche Players apply their strengths to target particular use cases or geographical regions,
especially in terms of product variants. Their geographic strategy limits their international
reach in terms of indirect channels, but not necessarily customer base nor direct reach.
They offer products that demonstrate competence across a range of critical capabilities,
with particular strengths in one or few of these. Niche Players lack the level of overall
viability that Leaders possess, and tend to lag in terms of marketing execution, which
results in diminished visibility and brand awareness. A Niche Player could potentially
provide better capability for a given use case than a more general vendor categorized as a
Leader.

Context
As businesses evolve to become digital, they generate wide data, increasing the need for
insight engine technology to surface relevant information and data from myriad sources.
Vendors in this market have mature solutions and offer cost-effective and systemic
approaches to improving the use of information and data for work and automation. From
a value for money standpoint, insight engines offer flexibility and broad applicability when
it comes to getting and pushing data to the broadest set of customers and employees.

For many clients, their subscription to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace includes an
insight engine (Microsoft Search and Google Cloud Search, respectively), which serves as
an enterprisewide solution for all their employees. However, customization by industry and
use case, delivery to third-party applications, or control of configuration should prompt
consideration of these vendors’ and others in this Magic Quadrant. In so doing, they
should decide whether to extend the capabilities of their enterprisewide solution or
introduce an additional insight engine to address localized use cases: the long tail of
business role-specific use cases.

Insight engines should never be treated as discrete, insular applications. Rather, they
should be considered as augmentation services that tap into, enhance and extend a wide
variety of other data types, sources and systems. They are evolving from search to
provide content enrichment pipelines and integral to an organization’s digital ecosystem,
which is complex, extensive and interconnected. Additionally, their use of natural
language, both in terms of what is indexed and how it is queried, places them in the wider
context of an organization’s natural language technologies (NLT). Consequently,
deployment times average around half a year, with some taking a couple of months and
others more than a year.

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This Magic Quadrant is intended to help application leaders make vendor and product
selection decisions in the market for insight engines. It represents a snapshot of the
market. Year-over-year comparisons should be avoided. This Magic Quadrant will help you
select an insight engine, but do not use it as your only aid. Also consult the companion
Critical Capabilities for Insight Engines, which will help you identify product differentiation
and use-case alignment. You should also consider which, if any, insight engines are
currently deployed.

Your final selection criteria must reflect your organization’s functional and technical
requirements and business objectives. Do not, for example, select a Leader or reject a
Niche Player simply because it is categorized as such. Assess any vendor that meets your
essential requirements — a vendor in any one of the four quadrants could be the best
choice for your needs.

Market Overview
Insight engines apply composite AI to search, extract, enrich and index data drawn from
multiple sources for query. This enables the highly relevant delivery of:

■ Relevant information to people for decision and action

■ Feature-rich data to machines to support the ingestion of data for analysis and
automation elsewhere

Products in this market constitute a platform of capabilities on which applications are

supplied, developed or augmented by vendors working with their clients and/or partners.

This research uses inclusion and exclusion criteria to identify the principal vendors for this
market and then evaluates each on its ability to execute and completeness of vision — see
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria and Evaluation Criteria. Based on this analysis, our key
findings are as follows:

■ There is one new entrant — SearchBlox — and one exit — Google — in terms of
participating vendors compared with last year’s Magic Quadrant. SearchBlox offers
an insight engine built on Elasticsearch. Google no longer offers its Google Cloud
Search as a separate product, distinct from Google Workspace.

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■ The dot position has changed significantly for four vendors, resulting in their
placement shifting from one quadrant to another. With the exception of one vendor,
these quadrant changes arise on the completeness of vision axis, but reflect
movement on both axes.

■ The market is growing both in terms of vendor revenue and potential candidates for
inclusion. The total revenue of participating vendors has increased, and we also see
many SaaS- and ML-based products from smaller vendors, including startups.
Despite this, the market has yet to mature as demonstrated by the number of leaders
and absence of consolidation in recent years. However, there are indicators of
consolidation. This year, Upland Software acquired BA Insight, which received an
honorable mention last year. In 2020, ServiceNow acquired Attivio, a leader until
2019.

■ The delivery of relevant and contextualized experiences — much sought after by

current and prospective buyers — is especially dependent on three critical
capabilities: personalization (to capture user’s context); extraction and enrichment of
data (to match indexed data to context); and delivery of results to various
touchpoints (UIs; to deliver insight in context).

■ Most vendors have now made the shift to cloud-centric deployment through vendor-
managed service offerings. Although some clients require on-premises deployment
and/or the ability to index data sources on-premises, we see a clear shift — through
Gartner’s inquiry service and the change in deployment models of vendors’ products
— to cloud-first plus the option of hybrid rather than on-premises or hybrid as the
principal deployment model.

■ An open systems approach that provides a combination of interoperability,

portability and open software standards continues to underpin a growing number of
vendors with the trend being toward Elasticsearch as the preferred engine of choice.
At least six of the 15 vendors featured here are built on or leverage an open-source
search engine, with five of these six vendors using Elasticsearch.

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Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
DXP Digital experience platforms

BYOM Bring your own model

ML Machine learning

CX Customer experience

EX Employee experience

NL Natural language

NLP Natural language processing

HITL Human-in-the-loop

NN Neural network

OMR Optical mark recognition

POS Part-of-speech

NER Named-entity recognition

CCS Customer service and support

IP Intellectual property

SaaS Software-as-a-service

UI User interface (touchpoint)

BERT Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers

GPT-3 Generative pretrained transformer 3

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Note 1: Business Moments
A business moment is a transient opportunity in which people, data, businesses and
things work together dynamically to create value, which can be created or leveraged.
Moments happen in business all the time (for example, when buying a product, receiving a
delivery, answering a service question or collecting payment). Gartner believes a business
moment is a potential point at which a change in value — that is, a gain or loss in value —
can be exploited and/or realized. When we refer to things in the context of a business
moment, we include physical touchpoints (UIs) represented by the Internet of Things (IoT),
as well as virtual constructs such as algorithms or AI-based systems. We believe that
business moments are how digital business comes to life.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market.
This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on,
whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the
market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial

health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the
individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the
product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of
products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the
structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and

achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of
responsiveness.

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Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to
deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and
business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with
the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be
driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of
mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients

to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways
customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary
tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups,
service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs,
systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and
efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and
to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of
vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those
with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the
scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer
base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery
that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map
to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.

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Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings
to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise

or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography
and market.

Document Revision History

Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines - 17 March 2021

Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines - 27 February 2020

Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines - 11 July 2018

Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines - 30 March 2017

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Gartner, Inc. | G00748852 Page 37 of 38

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Gartner, Inc. | G00748852 Page 38 of 38

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

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Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Low

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation Medium

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

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