Tremendous forces are at work changing the landscape of data: cloud, cheaper compute cycles, ever more prolific communications, complex data structures and the storage capacity of big data technologies all have decision makers swimming upstream against an ever-broader surging tide of information.

A recently concluded survey, compiled by David White Aberdeen Group's lead Business Intelligence market analyst, uncovers a gap with traditional business intelligence technologies. The need for better decision support technology is growing as fast as the supply of data and the demand for actionable information. For example, a growing majority of enterprise information consumers have identified self-service as their top solution to make information analysis more responsive to their every day needs.

Search, as it turns out, is ideally suited to this meet this appetite, both owing to its flexibility and the inherent usability of its query-based interface. What's more, companies who have turned to open source search have cut their search costs in half. Download the white paper "Enterprise Search: Commodity or Revolution?" and learn about underlying factors driving the need for better, faster, more agile search applications:

• As the supply of information grows, decision makers demand better agility and speed in consuming it
• Self-service access to information is critical to faster, more productive use of increasingly large and diversified data sources
• Best-in-class organizations are using search to push information proactively, holistically mixing structured and unstructured sources
• The search index has come to take the role of 'single source of truth', once conventionally attributed to transaction-centered business intelligence tools
• Open source cuts the costs of search in half – for software, hardware, external services and internal support.