LucidWorks Success was Obvious Early

November 9, 2012

An early (2009) discussion on The Noisy Channel entitled, “Lucid Imagination” gives some insight into the LucidWorks (formerly Lucid Imagination) business model.

The author, Daniel Tunkelang, begins:

“Can Lucid Imagination really succeed as the Red Hat of enterprise search, making money by supporting open-source Lucene and Solr? Perhaps. Lucene is certainly popular among folks looking for a free search engine. Moreover, for people who want to tinker with it, its being open source is a big plus . . . Will Lucid Imagination revolutionize the enterprise search market by providing low-cost services on top of free software?”

So LucidWorks and others like it count on users who want the innovation and cost-efficiency of open source, but need some help with the customization. So far it is a working business model. Furthermore, other open source search experts agree.

Otis Gospodnetic of Sematext left the following comment on the post:

“There is room for both the ES [enterprise search] vendors and companies like Lucid or Sematext. Which road a client chooses to take depends on a number of factors, such as initial price (obvious), TOC, feature set, speed of engagement and delivery of solution, presence of in-house search expertize, so on. ES vendors clearly have more features, more user-friendly UIs, etc., but I think it’s a matter of time when Lucene & friends catch up or at least significantly close the gap.”

From the perspective of the modern day, the business model is working. Users are satisfied by the service and support offered by LucidWorks and the innovation and stability provided by the base of Lucene and Solr.

Emily Rae Aldridge, November 09, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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