2012 has been a fascinating and stormy year for those of us in the search business. We’ve seen a raft of further acquisitions of commercial closed source search companies by bigger players, some convinced that what used to be called Enterprise Search is now a solution to Big Data (like Stephen Arnold we wonder what will succeed Big Data as the next marketing term – I love his phrase “In a quest for revenue, the vendors will wrap basic ideas in a cloud of unknowing”). One acquisition hasn’t gone so smoothly: Autonomy, bought by HP for a price that no-one in the search business thought was remotely sensible, has been accused of being oversold vapourware: this is a story that will continue to develop in 2013. If you want a great overview of the current market read Martin White’s latest research note.
Here in the slightly calmer waters of open source search, we’ve seen a huge rise in enquiries from often blue-chip companies, no longer needing persuasion that open source is a serious contender for even the largest search and content projects. Often these companies have considered large commercial solutions but are put off by both the price and high-pressure marketing tactics – in a world of reduced budgets you simply can’t sell magic beans for a pile of gold. We’ve also seen increased interest in related technologies such as machine learning and automatic categorisation – search really isn’t just about search any more.
At Flax we’re busier than we have ever been and we’re expected the trend to continue. We’re looking forward to running more Cambridge Search Meetups, visiting and helping organise conferences such as Enterprise Search Europe and Lucene Revolution, building our network of carefully chosen partners and of course working on exciting and cutting-edge development projects.
As the storms in our sector continue to rage overhead we’ll simply be getting on with what we do best, building effective search.
It hasn’t taken long for some of Autonomy’s rivals to attempt to capitalise on the recent bad PR around HP’s acquisition – OpenText has offered a ’software trade-in’, Recommind has offered a ‘trade-up’ and Swiss company RSD has offered a free license for their governance software to Autonomy customers. No word yet from Exalead, Oracle (Endeca), Microsoft (FAST) or any of the other big commercial search companies but I’m sure their salespeople are making the most of the situation.
Migrating a search engine from one technology to another is rarely trouble-free: data must be re-indexed, query architectures rewritten, integration with external systems re-done, relevancy checked…however with sufficient forethought it can be done successfully. We’ve just helped one client migrate from a commercial engine to Apache Solr in a matter of weeks: although at first glance Solr didn’t seem to support all of the features the commercial engine provided, it proved possible to simulate them using multiple queries and with careful design for scalability, query performance is comparable.
Choosing one closed source engine to replace another doesn’t remove the risk that future corporate mergers & acquisitions will cause exactly the same lack of confidence that is no doubt affecting Autonomy customers – or huge increases in license fees, a drop in the quality of available support or the end of the product line altogether – and we’ve heard of all of these effects over the last few years. Moving to an open source search engine gives you freedom and control of the future of the technology your business is reliant upon, with a wealth of options for migration assistance, development and support.
So here’s our offer – we’d be happy to talk, for free (by phone or face-to-face for customers within reach of our Cambridge offices), to any Autonomy customers considering migration and to help them consider the open source options (some of these even have the Bayesian, probabilistic search features Autonomy IDOL provides) – and together with our partners we can also provide a level of ongoing support comparable to any closed source vendor. We don’t have salespeople, we don’t have a product to sell you and you’ll be talking directly to experts with decades of experience implementing search – and there’s no obligation to take things any further. We’d simply like to offer an alternative (and we believe, safer) route to effective search.
We’re very happy to announce we’ve partnered with Sirius Corporation. Sirius are the leading U.K. provider of managed services, support and training for open source software with an impressive and growing list of clients including Canonical, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Met Office. We’ve recently carried out a major project for which Sirius will be providing ongoing support on a 24/7 SLA basis and we’re looking forward to further collaboration with this energetic, highly professional and skilled company.
We’re also happy to announce that Flax and Sirius will be co-hosting a free, half day event on Open Source Enterprise Search on Friday 20th July from 9.30 a.m. Held at the Sirius Corporation offices in Weybridge, Surrey, this will be an opportunity to find out how open source search can directly benefit your business. Whether you need search over documents on an intranet or database, pages on a website or more specialised applications such as media monitoring, taxonomy and classification, open source technologies can offer an economical and highly scalable route to success. The event will feature focussed briefings, networking and discussion with leading experts in the field. It’s completely free to attend and breakfast, refreshments and a riverside barbeque lunch will be provided.
You can register and find out more online.
Last night our US partners Lucid Imagination announced that LucidWorks, their packaged and supported version of Apache Lucene/Solr, is available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. It seems like only a few weeks since Amazon announced their own CloudSearch system and no doubt other ’search as a service’ providers are waiting in the wings (we’re going to need a new acronym as SaaS is already taken!). At first the combination of a search platform based on open source Java code with Microsoft hosting might seem strange, and it raises some interesting questions about the future of Microsoft’s own FAST Search technology – is this final proof that FAST will only ever be part of Sharepoint and never a standalone product? However with search technology becoming more and more of a commodity this is a great option for customers looking for search over relatively small numbers of documents.
Lucid’s offering is considerably more flexible and full-featured than Amazon’s, which we hear is pretty basic with a lack of standard search features like contextual snippets and a number of bugs in the client software. You can see the latter in action at Runar Buvik’s excellent OpenTestSearch website. With prices for the Lucid service ranging from free for small indexes, this is certainly an option worth considering.
It’s been an interesting and busy twelve months here at Flax – we’ve worked on some fantastic customer projects, spoken at conferences at home and abroad and made some great alliances and partnerships. We are talking to more people than ever before about the advantages of open source search and we’ve even started a local Meetup group.
This has been the year when open source search moved out of the shadows and became a force to reckon with – whether handling billions of queries or millions of customers, powering innovative new APIs for open content from forward-looking media companies or simply making it easier for search applications to be developed. Commercial support is now available to rival anything offered by the closed source world and there are now fully packaged solutions built on open source. In some sectors open source may even become the default choice (see what IDC said about the embedded/OEM market).
There’s still significant change to come in the search sector – I expect a few vendors will be in trouble by this time next year as they realise their business models (often built on per-document charges) are out-of-date, and we might also see further acquisitions by the usual behemoths. All this leads to reduced choice and increased costs for customers, and this is where open source can help – you can build your search solution in-house, or engage companies like ours to help, but you’re no longer locked in to a vendor’s roadmap and shackled to their business plan (or the consequences of its failure!).
I’ll leave the final word to Matt Asay of Canonical, who says: “Open source is how we do business 10 years into this new millennium.”
If you’re considering a Lucene/Solr powered search solution, you may be interested in LucidWorks Enterprise, produced by our partners Lucid Imagination. They’ve taken Lucene/Solr and added a powerful admin GUI, ReST API, web spiders, file crawlers, database connectors, alerts, a clickthrough framework and more. All this comes with a range of excellent support options backed by the experts at Lucid.
If you’d like to know more read this downloadable PDF or contact us for more information and a demo.
We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been selected as an Authorized Partner by Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Lucene and Solr. You can read the press release as a PDF here.
Apache Lucene and Solr, available as open source software from the Apache Software Foundation, are powerful, scalable, reliable and fully-featured search technologies. Solr is the Lucene Search Server, making it easy to build search applications for the enterprise.
With our long experience of customising, installing and supporting open source search engines, this partnership is a natural fit for us, and we’re excited by the opportunities it presents. In addition to our current offerings, Flax will now offer installation, integration and commercial support packages for Lucene and Solr, backed by Lucid Imagination.
