Lucid Imagination promotes Apache Lucene

According to Eric Gies, the new CEO of Lucid Imagination the company is aiming to provide the commercial resources necessary to make Lucene as popular and well known in the enterprise search field, as Firefox and Drupal are in theirs. In a blog post on the companies website Mr Gies explains Lucid's mission. The firm is "the first commercial company exclusively dedicated to the Apache Lucene open source technology." Lucid Imagination, officially founded in 2007, is now coming out of 'stealth mode' with $6 million in funding and large clients including HP, FedEx, AOL, Apple, Comcast, and others.

The enterprise search software company's platform is based on Apache's Lucene, one of the top-5 Apache projects, and Apache's Solr open source project. Lucene is one of the most widely used open source solutions for enterprise search, while Solr is a Lucene sub-project that focuses on web services and is implemented as an add on. According to the blog post, "Lucene/Solr downloads have grown nearly 10x over the past three years, with the current run-rate of over 6,000 downloads a day."

Lucid Imagination will offer commercial support, training, consulting services and value-added software for enterprises using Lucene and Solr-based search solutions. Subscription costs currently range from $12,000 to $18,000 per year.

The Lucid Imagination team includes about 10 of the Lucene/Solr project's top 10 committers and founding members include experts Marc Krellenstein, Yonik Seeley, Grant Ingersoll and Erik Hatcher. Lucid is competing with other companies such as Microsoft's FAST, Endeca, and IBM which offers it's own Lucene based offering.

(crve)