Lightcrest Cloud Nine: Does Nirvana Come from Commodity Plumbing?
May 7, 2015
Lightcrest seems to want to be a major player in the enterprise search market. Recently the company’s senior management has posted links to LinkedIn enterprise search discussion groups. The president is Zach Fierstadt, and I wanted to read some of this other contributions to the search and content processing discussions I follow.
The Metaphors Used to Sell Search in the Cloud
I read “Cloud Nine Is a Private Cloud.” To me, Cloud Nine evokes a somewhat imprecise connotation; specifically, “heaven” and “a utopia of pleasure.” The notion of a utopia of pleasure makes me uncomfortable because promising wondrous outcomes from jargonized technology often comes to no good end.
Definitions
The Urban Dictionary’s word cloud for Cloud Nine exacerbates my discomfort:
How do pleasure and technology link in hosted search services. Here’s a definition of pleasure from Google.
I noted that the word is used or intended for entertainment rather than business. “pleasure boats”. I immediately think of Caligula’s Lake Nemi ships, the Gary Hart vessel Monkey Business, and the Xoogler’s death by heroin yacht Escape. Let me say that I am not calmed by how my mind relates to metaphors of pleasure and information access.
Assertions
Now let’s look at the article “Cloud Nine Is a Private Cloud,” which is at this link, http://www.lightcrest.com/blog/2015/04/cloud-nine-is-a-private-cloud/. The author is Zach Fierstadt, who asserts:
Most public cloud providers are not tuned to provide you with full-stack support, including things like DevOps services and caching best-practices. This cost haunts CTOs in the form of sprawling staff requirements, whereby operational staff required to support a 24x7x365 operation grows as the infrastructure on the public cloud grows.
None of these references evoke any pleasure. I noodled over the reference to “DevOps,” which is a neologism. Like much jargon, the word “DevOps” blurs the distinction between two perfectly useful terms: Developers and Operations.
Hosting companies in general and Lightcrest in particular can, as I understand it, make a DevOp’s life into a digital utopia. Mr. Fierstadt writes:
The growth of private and hybrid cloud solutions is indicative of CIOs and CTOs realizing the economic benefits and performance optimizations associated with sophisticated cloud orchestration layered on top of single-tenant hardware. As your workloads and storage requirements grow, make sure your costs don’t blow your budget – and be sure to consider long-term alternatives that allow you to focus on your core business initiatives, and not on cloud operations or cloud economics.
Now this sounds pretty darned good. I like the parental tone and parental rhetoric of “make sure” and attendant sentence structure as well. When I was in college, I knew one student who thought any polysyllabic stream of nonsense was the stuff of his Technicolor dreams. For me, references to sophisticated, optimizations, workloads, costs, core business initiatives, etc. is a substitute for facts, thought provoking commentary, and useful information. Lightcrest offers my hungry mind thin gruel.
Lightcrest’s Alleged Expertise
I did some poking around on the Lightcrest Web site and learned that when the verbiage is parsed, the company does a couple of things. These are:
- Hosting
- Consulting.
Before I could see the sun through the psychedelic cloud of marketing silliness, I learned that Lightcrest has expertise in the following search and content processing systems. You can find the list at this link. Lightcrest, the Cloud Nine technology operation, can provide “expertise” for:
- Document management search
- eCommerce search
- Intranet search
- Web indexing.
When it comes to expertise which means skill or knowledge in a particular field, Lightcrest makes other search centric outfits a bit like also rans. Please, check out this collection of systems which the Cloud Nine organization can make bark, sit, roll over, and fetch the newspaper:
- Attivio enterprise search
- Autonomy and Verity. (I thought that Hewlett Packard had moved Autonomy to the cloud and repositioned it as something other than enterprise search. I am confused.)
- Custom indexers and support. (What is a custom indexer? Does Lightcrest have proprietary crawling, parsing, and querying technology? Isn’t that important? Doesn’t an outfit with gargantuan expertise have a fact sheet about these functions?)
- Endeca search and business intelligence. (Isn’t Oracle the owner of Endeca? Why is Endeca separate from Oracle? What happened to Endeca as an eCommerce search system? I must be senile.)
- LucidWorks (Really?)
- Microsoft Fast ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) and FDS 4.x. (which I thought was shorthand for Fire Dynamics Simulator. Shows how little search expertise I have.)
- Oracle Enterprise Search (Is this Secure Enterprise Search, Oracle Text, or functionality from InQuira, TripleHop, or RightNow? No matter. Expertise is easy to say, but I think it might be slightly more difficult to deliver.)
- Solr, Lucene, Nutch, Mahout, and Hadoop. (Are Mahout and Hadoop software delivering functions other than enterprise information retrieval? )
- Sphinx and MySQL full text searching.
Some Considerations
Frankly I have grave doubts about this organization’s expertise in these areas. I have several reasons:
First, the odd ball mix of search systems mixes apples and quite old oranges. The square pegs are not in the square spaces. Round pegs sit precariously in the gaps designed for squares.
Also, the logic of the listing of these search engines defies me. I thought Mahout was software for machine learning and data mining, not information retrieval. How does one support and host software which is difficult to obtain from its owners of the intellectual property like Fast ESP or Verity?
The reference to “custom indexers” is interesting. Is Lightcrest able to index the Deep Web like BrightPlanet or like Recorded Future and its monitoring of Tor exit nodes? I wonder if Lightcrest has comparable technical horsepower for this type of work? Based on my experience with BrightPlanet and Recorded Future, I would suggest that Lightcrest is nosing into quite rarified territory without setting forth credentials which give me confidence in the company’s ability to deliver. What exactly are “custom indexers”? Am I able to apply these to a list of Tor sites and cross tabulate retrieved data with targeted clear Web crawls?
In my opinion and without evidence, facts, and concrete examples, the Lightcrest assertions are search engine optimization outputs.
The CEO as a Thought Leader
At least in the LinkedIn enterprise search “space,” Zach Fierstadt has attracted modest attention with his one sentence link only posts. Mr. Fierstadt wrote a non search related article in 2003 labeled “10G Matures” for Computerworld. He has a brief profile or “entry” in Google Plus, Zoom Info, and Stocktwits and a number of other social media sites. He made this statement in a 2010
“Look, there a lot of search solutions out there; but few cut the mustard when it comes to delivering sub-second performance at a reasonable price point. Lucene/Solr is the only platform that gives us the economy of scale needed to provide enterprise-grade search within our hosting model. By leveraging our expertise in deploying search within the enterprise, Lightcrest will be able to provide search solutions to smaller and mid-sized businesses that currently find proprietary platforms to be cost prohibitive.
What’s up with Lightcrest? Lightcrest walks gently, almost as if the company were weightless and massless. Maybe content marketing or just social media shot gunning? The company’s blog archives reveal marketing activities in September 2013 and then gaps in the content flow until January 2014, September 2014, December 2014, and the recent efflorescence of marketing oriented posts.
Bottom Line: Mass or Massless
Net net: Lightcrest may answer the question, “Is light a particle or a wave?” From what I understand about this company, there is most hand waving.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2015
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