We thought we'd kick off the New Year by sharing some predictions for the world of search, and for Exalead, by Exalead Co-founder François Bourdoncle (from his One on One interview with Ron Miller of Fierce Content Management).

What changes have you seen in enterprise search in all your years in the business? "Some people say that enterprise search is dead [...] However, the amount of data produced by large corporations is booming [...] and scalability is quickly becoming the number one requirement of high-end search systems. I actually believe that enterprise search is still in its infancy, at least when you think of "search" as an Internet-inspired infrastructure for designing business applications. Of course, most of the building blocks are already there [...] What is very new, however, is the way to combine all these technologies into a coherent infrastructure that can be applied to all sorts of business contexts and on any scale."

What do you see as the biggest challenges for enterprise search in 2009 and how will you meet them? "I think that 2009 is going to be a turning point for enterprise search. Search as a standalone application will become less and less important, and search vendors in this area will probably struggle to survive. However, in the current economic environment, large corporations will look for new ways to reduce their operational costs [...] I believe that search-based business applications can help large corporations drastically reduce their IT costs, and that will be Exalead's challenge for 2009."

We'll keep you posted on the fulfillment of this vision in 2009, and in the meantime... Happy New Year to everyone on behalf of all Exalead teams!