subject: Open Source Search And The Analysts Radar [print this page] Two analysts reports were published recently by specialists who focus on the search space. Lucene/Solr search figured in both of them, in a manner of speaking. First, Ovum published a report on the state of enterprise search. While the scoring methodology favors bundled solutions with features you may or may not need, they offer the following interesting observations about Solr/Lucene.
Apache Lucene Solr 1.4 is rated explore in this assessment. Lucene Solr must be appreciated for what it truly represents: a strong open-source library and toolset that is the most customizable of all solutions in the market. Lucene Solr 1.4 is truly enterprise grade and its open source code can be immensely helpful for organizations that are trying to explore facets of search not provided by commercial vendors. Ovum strongly recommends it for large organizations that have an expertise in development and coding and sufficient IT manpower to customize the solution to their unique needs. The solution is also recommended for IT departments that are true ISVs in themselves and can manage large scale projects internally. Even for routine tasks such as the simple indexing of a massive library of documents running into billions of documents, this solution can prove extremely effective given that the end-user will not need to pay by the number of documents indexed (as opposed to pricing models followed by the likes of Google).
The second analysts report comes from an organization you may have heard of, called The Gartner Group (they used to publish a magic quadrant, now replaced by a market scope). Their analysis of the pace can be found here (again, draw your own conclusions about how the organization sponsoring publication fared in the report).
I, for one, find it interesting that with all these criteria about organizations and vendors, little attention is paid to technologies. Perhaps this is driven by the fact that Gartners subscribers want to know who to buy from, not what to buy. Odd, to say the least, that one might believe that _what_ one buys matters less than _who_ one buys it from. Could this be a weakness of the approach? Let the following picture allow me to skip the next thousand words
I dont know about you, but when I shop, I like to know what Im going to buy and use, not just whos selling it. And theres not a lot of mystery about the use of open source technologies, not least Lucene/Solr. Though to read these reports, it seems some might wonder if the jury is still out.
What does it take to help decision makers to see the value and opportunity in open source search technology? Ill give the last word to Ovum:
For any open source product to be considered enterprise grade, possessing a viable and strong third party service backbone is necessary. Apart from a great product, enterprises need guarantees of assisted deployment, support, bug fixes, updates, and ongoing consulting.
That sounds familiar: a great product, guarantees of assisted deployment, support, bug fixes, updates, and ongoing consulting.
