Marc Krellenstein Interview: Inside Lucid Imagination
March 17, 2009
Open source search is gaining more and more attention. Marc Krellenstein, one of the founders of Lucid Imagination, a search and services firm, talked about the company’s technology with Stephen E. Arnold, ArnoldIT.com. Mr. Krellenstein was the innovator behind Northern Light’s search technology, and he served as the chief technical officer for Reed Elsevier, where he was responsible for search.
In an exclusive interview, Mr. Krellenstein said:
I started Lucid in August, 2007 together with three key Lucene/Solr core developers – Erik Hatcher, Grant Ingersoll and Yonik Seeley – and with the advice and support of Doug Cutting, the creator of Lucene, because I thought Lucene/Solr was the best search technology I’d seen. However, it lacked a real company that could provide the commercial-grade support and other services needed to realize its potential to be the most used search software (which is what you’d expect of software that is both the best core technology and free). I also wanted to continue to innovate in search, and believed it is easier and more productive to do so if you start with a high quality, open source engine and a large, active community of developers.
Mr. Krellenstein’s technical team gives the company solid open source DNA. With financial pressures increasing and many organizations expressing dissatisfaction with mainstream search solutions, Lucid Imagination may be poised to enjoy rapid growth.
Mr. Krelllenstein added:
I think most search companies that fail do so because they don’t offer decisively better and affordable software than the competition and/or can’t provide high quality support and other services. We aim to provide both and believe we are already working with the best and most affordable software. Our revenue comes not only from services such as training but also from support contracts and from value-add software that makes deploying Lucene/Solr applications easier and makes the applications better.
You can read the full text of the interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. Search Wizards Speak is a collection of 36 candid interviews with movers and shakers in search, content processing, and business intelligence. Instead of reading what consultants say about a company’s technology, read what the people who developed the search and content processing systems say about their systems. Interviews may be reprinted and distributed without charge. Attribution and a back link to ArnoldIT.com and the company whose executive is featured in the interview are required. Stephen E. Arnold provides these interviews as a service to those interested in information retrieval.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
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