News out today from Lucid Imagination's commercial offerings around the Apache Lucene portfolio:
Our commercial offering includes support, training, consulting services and value-added software for enterprises using Lucene- and Solr-based search solutions.
As many of you know, Apache Lucene's project is widely used in enterprise search products. Solr is a subproject of the Lucene top-level project. Think of Lucene as the library, and Solr as a higher-level abstraction.
Lucid's president and CEO, Eric Gries, quotes a few figures regarding Lucene/Solr:
- Among top 15 open source projects
- One of top 5 Apache projects
- Installation at over 4,000 companies
- Over 6,000 downloads per day
- Playing in a $1.8 billion market growing at a 28 percent CAGR
Companies like Netflix and Ticketmaster utilize Lucene/Solr. As Lucid's CEO highlighted to me, these companies live and die by the quality of their search results. Up until now, these companies have been doing the heavy lifting themselves or securing the services of Lucene committers. The Lucid team saw an opportunity to become the commercial entity behind Lucene/Solr (especially since key Lucene committers work at Lucid).
A great thing about Lucid's business model is that search software isn't a "set it and forget it" solution. As Lucid's CTO Marc Krellenstein explained to me, search needs initial design assistance and ongoing tuning to improve the quality of search results. Lucid's team wants to help customers across the end-to-end use of Lucene/Solr in the enterprise. Very cool. Good luck to the Lucid team!
p.s.: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."