Showing posts with label consulting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consulting. Show all posts

Monday, January 26, 2009

Lucid Imagination and Sematex

Kudos to the Solr/Lucene gang for launching Lucid Imagination. Grant Ingersoll's announcement. People involved here and here. Some time ago Otis Gospodnetić launched Semtext. Good luck to Lucid and Sematext!

Both of these companies are in the 'support and consulting' model. This is wise, as going into Enterprise search directly is a tough road competing with Endeca, Verity(Autonomy), FAST(Microsoft), GoogleBox and the other vendors would be suicidal.

Aside:
Long ago (2003) I thought of hanging up a shingle for supporting HtDig (a once popular CGI based search engine), but wisely decided that would be a mistake given that even then I could see that Doug Cutting's Java Lucene and Nutch were going to smoke the creaky 8+ year old C++ indexing kernel. Ended up getting RightNow Tech to sponsor conversion of the guts to CLucene, where it still runs today indexing many many tens of millions of documents. Then Solr was announced .... and HtDig development died and I started using Solr.

Just touched base with Geoff Hutchinson the other day and we're going to release the 4.0 CLucene branch of HtDig, and put up an announcement of HtDig end-of-life and encourage people to migrate to Solr.