Enterprise search: The target is moving
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 10:25 AM
Lucid Imagination, an open-source enterprise search company, is looking to compete with established players like Autonomy, Microsoft’s Fast, and Endeca, but the target is already shifting.
Paula Rooney highlights Lucid CEO Eric Gries’ open-source enterprise search plan: be the Red Hat of enterprise search.
Lucid, which just emerged from stealth mode with US$6 million in funding, had already lined up some big customers like Hewlett-Packard and FedEx.
But let’s fast forward a bit. Like Red Hat, Lucid will start in one area and need to expand into new adjacent markets. Red Hat can offer a stack of software mainly fueled by its acquisition of JBoss and the middleware it provides. Lucid will have to follow a similar path. Why? The enterprise search market is already shifting.
Continues @ http://www.zdnetasia.com
The Lucene search library currently ranks amongst the top-15 open source projects and is one of the top-5 Apache projects, with installations at over 4,000 companies worldwide. Lucene/Solr downloads have grown nearly ten-fold over the past three years, with a current run-rate of over 6,000 downloads a day. The Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project. Apache Lucene/Solr offers an attractive, cost-effective alternative to the proprietary licensed search and discovery software products. The search and discovery market is growing at 28 percent per year, with 2007 revenue of $1.8 billion
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Lucid-Imagination-L…