Here at Flax, we're often called in to take a look at existing Apache Solr or Elasticsearch search applications, to suggest improvements, tune-ups or enhancements. It's impossible for us to know ahead of time what we might find - out-of-date versions of the software, slow performance on either (or both) the indexing or search side of the application ...Continue reading
As many others have noted, Google have recently announced their Google Search Appliance (GSA) will not be available for sale from 2017. Search gurus Miles Kehoe and Martin White have written an insightful analysis of the move with some recommendations as to what to do - because your GSA will simply stop working once the 2-year license expires. I don't agree with Lauren...Continue reading
Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading
I recently read a blog post by Karl Hampson of Realise Okana (who offer HP Autonomy and SRCH2 as closed source search options) on his view of the 'third wave' of search. The second wave he identifies (correctly) as open source, admitting somewhat grudgingly that "We’d heard about Lucene for years but no customers seemed to take it seriously until all of a s...Continue reading
It seems to be a bad summer for analyst companies in several sectors: here's Forrester getting a kicking from Digital Clarity Group about their Wave report on Digital Experience Delivery Platforms (my first challenge was understanding what on earth those are, but I think it's a new shiny name for web content management), Nuix Continue reading
The GCloud initiative and the associated CloudStore are a great idea - hoping to level the field of UK government IT supply, take advantage of flexible and agile delivery of software and services and help SMEs like ourselves compete against the large System Integrators (SIs) that dominate this market. GCloud sales have now reached £154m although this is still a fraction of what the UK government spends on IT. We're on GCloud 5 Continue reading
The last few weeks have seen a rush of investment in companies that offer Hadoop-powered Big Data platforms - the most recent being Intel's investment in Cloudera, but Hortonworks has also snorted up $100m. Gartner Continue reading
At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading
We're lucky enough to have our services available on the G-Cloud, a new initiative by the UK Government's Cabinet Office with the aim of breaking the sometimes monopolistic practices of 'big IT' when supplying government clients. We've recently had a couple of contracts procured via the G-Cloud iii framework and one of the requirements is to report whenever a client is invoiced. This is done via a website called Management Information Systems Onli...Continue reading
The most well known open source search engine, Apache Lucene/Solr, has a rival in Elasticsearch, also based on Apache Lucene. Or maybe it doesn't. I'm not convinced that there's an actual battle going on here, above and beyond the fact that the commercial companies formed to support each technology (Lucidworks and Elasticsearch [...Continue reading
