Exclusive Interview: Paul Doscher, President of Lucid Imagination
April 16, 2012
The Search Wizards Speak features Paul Doscher, the new president of Lucid Imagination. Mr. Doscher joined Lucid Imagination in December 2011. He had been president of Dassault Exalead USA prior to assuming the top spot at fast-growing, customer- and community-centric Lucid Imagination.
I spoke with Mr. Doscher when he was working for the Dassault Exalead organization. When he shifted to Lucid Imagination, I spoke with him about his views of open source search. After that brief initial conversation, I met again with Mr. Doscher and probed into his views about the impact open source search is having on traditional for-fee, proprietary search systems.
When I asked about the shift from proprietary search systems to open source search, he told me:
Today organizations need the flexibility to adapt and make changes. A proprietary solution may not permit the licensee to make enhancements. If a change is made, the proprietary search vendor may “own” the fix and will add that innovation to its core product. The licensee who created the fix gets nothing and may have had to pay for the right to innovate. As corporate information technology struggles to keep up with escalating business information demands and an ever increasing mountain of growing content of all types, open source search provides a cost effective and efficient way to develop applications to address the challenges and opportunities in today’s enterprise.
Mr. Doscher has strong views about how licensees of enterprise search systems have learned about costs, the time required to deploy a system, and the effort needed to keep a search system up and running. I asked him about Lucid Imagination’s approach to a search engagement. He said:
Our approach to an engagement is to listen to what our customers need, prepare an action plan, and then deliver. In a sense, our approach is the type of involvement that many software companies have stepped away from. We have an enthusiastic group of engineers and professionals who work with clients to meet their needs.
The full text of the interview appears on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. For more information about Lucid Imagination’s open source search system, you will want to explore the company’s Web site and its blog. In addition, an interview with one of the founders of Lucid Imagination, Marc Krellenstein, and with Eric Gries, a former executive at Lucid Imagination, is available in the Beyond Search archives.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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