It must be depressing to be Microsoft these days.
You spend $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search leader FAST in January 2008 and then another $100 million on semantic search vendor Powerset in July 2008, only to have the excellent Apache's Lucene, an open-source search project, and Solr, an enterprise search server based on Lucene, offer better performance at a 100 percent discount.
Not very sporting of the open-source community, now is it?
Granted, Lucene and Solr still lack some of the spit and polish that Microsoft FAST, Autonomy, Google's enterprise search appliance, and other proprietary competitors offer, but this isn't slowing its adoption. As CMS Watch's Kas Thomas notes, interest in Lucene and Solr is skyrocketing, as measured by job postings (among other data):
Indeed.com job postings suggest high interest in Solr and Lucene
This was OK when Lucene stood alone, relatively rough and unadorned by Solr. But Solr makes Lucene much more palatable to enterprises that worry about getting mired in Microsoft (or Autonomy or Google or...), particularly with the uncertainty and unrest prior to its acquisition that may have led to an employee brain drain at FAST, and interest in Solr is improved further by the arrival of Lucid Imagination, a company started in 2007 to commercialize Lucene and Solr.
I talked Wednesday with Marc Krellenstein, co-founder and CTO at Lucid Imagination, and learned that while Lucene and Solr have been doing exceptionally well on their own, Lucid Imagination is in pole position to help advance the development of these open-source projects by offering dedicated development resources and to make a solid business for itself in the process.
Just having a company associated with Lucene and Solr may already be enough to get enterprises off the fence and behind the search project.
According to Krellenstein, Solr delivers significant performance improvements over proprietary alternatives. The goal is to continue to improve its functionality, which currently has roughly 80 percent of the total functionality of rival search products while also advancing innovation to surpass these rivals. The company and project have been making steady progress in these areas.
Did the Lucene/Solr community just upend billions of dollars in Microsoft, Google, Autonomy, and others' investments in proprietary search? Time will tell, but $1.2 billion for FAST is looking mighty expensive compared with the $0.00 Microsoft could have paid for Lucene.
Unfortunately, that's what its customers may be thinking, too. Like the U.S. intelligence community, for starters, which is now standardizing on Solr/Lucene. Microsoft and its peers must be hoping this will remain confidential.
Not a chance.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to Lucid Imagination.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If you were looking to create a start-up, and particularly an open-source start-up, you could hardly do better than to stumble upon a pre-existing open-source project with millions of downloads, widespread adoption by some of the biggest names in the industry, and a fast-growing enterprise need.
Take Lucene, for example, as CMS Watch's Kas Thomas noted on Monday. It is a hugely popular project with one big failing: no enterprise support. Writes Thomas:
Lucene has a lot going for it...(It's) one of the safest (open-source projects) around, in terms of governance and oversight (through the Apache Foundation), the maturity of the code, the amount of active development going on, the size and vitality of the user ecosystem, and the number of high-traffic Web sites that have validated the technology in real-world applications (some better-known examples being Monster.com, Netflix, and Wikipedia).
Perhaps reflective of all this, Lucene has become a top-five Apache project, with 7,000 downloads a day.
But one thing Lucene is not is an out-of-the-box solution...To go from Lucene to a ready-to-deploy solution requires programming (and lots of it). And when you have a problem, there's no phone number to dial in the middle of the night. It's just you, the source code, and the community.
Enter Lucid Imagination, a commercial Lucene company that on Monday announced a $6 million Series A round of venture financing from Granite Ventures and Walden International, which also invested in SugarCRM.
Started by Eric Gries in 2007, the company already has a full roster of customers that includes Netflix, Hewlett-Packard, FedEx, Orbitz, AOL, Apple, Comcast, and Zappos, which sets it apart from Gries' former venture, Levanta (formerly Linuxcare), where he was CEO.
In fact, in talking with Gries several times over the past few months as a member of Lucid's advisory board, it became apparent to me that the Levanta experience may well prove to be one of the best reasons to be optimistic about Lucid, in addition to its stellar roster of engineers and Doug Cutting, the founder of Lucene, as an adviser.
Enterprise search is a growing market, and Lucene (and its more commercially friendly Solr brother) is keeping the pace. The question then becomes whether Lucid and Gries can provide enough value around Lucene to warrant companies such as Netflix spending big with Lucid rather than rolling their own Lucene-based search solution.
I think it can, because it's being run by people that have learned the hard way how to ensure open-source success. As an adviser to Lucid, I'm somewhat biased, and doubly so because my own company uses Lucene as part of our content management solution, so I've felt the power and pain of Lucene firsthand. But I believe that this is a space to watch and a company worth watching.
TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.
Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.
Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, which is why I continue to believe it's critical that we find ways to encourage open-source contributions in a Web world that isn't bound by Open Source 1.0's licensing. It's therefore unfortunate that the Web lacks the "Software 1.0"'s licensing restrictions.
Perhaps the market will sort all this out, with Google and others seeing a strategic interest in open-source contributions, despite a lack of compulsion from open-source licensing. Perhaps. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
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