This morning I was told about the launch of a new US-based search company, Heliosearch, founded by the creator of Apache Solr, Yonik Seeley. It seems the landscape of open source search and in particular Solr is changing again – Heliosearch are planning their own ‘certified’ distribution of Solr plus a raft of support, consulting and services. In the meantime, the company Yonik co-founded (and our partners) LucidWorks are recently launched an ‘App Store’ for search, the Solr Marketplace, offering add-ons to the core engine from both themselves and others.
What we’re seeing here is the further growth of an ecosystem based around what has almost become the default choice for new and migrating search applications. Some clients will want a packaged distribution of Solr, some will be happy to download the source from Apache, some will need help getting started and some will just need help when things get complicated, or support for a running application. We’ve seen all of these requirements and more in the last year.
Next week the largest conference on open source search, Lucene Revolution is held in Dublin, and four of the Flax team are attending. Do let us know if you’d like to meet up – I don’t think there’s going to be a lack of things to talk about!
