At just-concluded Gartner Symposium in Las Vegas, Whit Andrews, raconteur and Gartner’s increasingly influential lead analyst on search (aka Information Access) offered a forward look on the market that stated: “Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by 2012.” (See Chris Kanaracus’ write-up of Whit’s talk in PC World’s PCW Business Center.)

What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.