Lucidworks (Really?) Channels Exalead Circa 2006

February 16, 2017

I know that many search wizards have short memories. If the mavens have long memories, the thought process may be that no one remembers the past. Yo, gentle reader, I do. Exalead, a search and retrieval system, spawned by a former member of the AltaVista team is now part of Dassault, the French super engineering firm. At one time, clear eyed marketers at Exalead decided that the best way to sell licenses to Exalead’s pretty good search system was to position the system as the enabler of search based applications. One of the Dassault Exalead wizards wrote a book about this. The book appeared in 2011 as “Search Based Applications: At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies” by Dr. David Grefenstette and Laura Wilbur.

Imagine my surprise when I read “Lucidworks Fusion 3 Enables Teams to Build Enterprise Search Apps Easier and Faster.” The write up explains:

Fusion 3 provides out-of-the-box capabilities for teams seeking to build robust enterprise-level search applications. With greater operational simplicity, IT personnel can now leapfrog months ahead in the development cycle, which allows them to focus on customizing applications to meet unique business needs. Shortening the development cycle even more, a streamlined guided setup feature makes Fusion 3 accessible to non-technical teams who can quickly build search applications that meet high user expectations.

There you go. A decade after the Exalead push for search based applications, Lucidworks (really?) has recycled another vendor’s concept. Note that the phrase “search based applications” was not new to Exalead. I recall hearing it used by one of Personal Library Software’s marketers decades earlier.

Will Lucidworks (really?) marketing pitch generate revenue? Exalead used its positioning to sell itself to Dassault in 2009? Will Lucidworks (really?) find a buyer? There are a number of open source integrators floating around.

More than recycled plastic is going to be needed to spark a renaissance in vendors piggybacking on the free and open source Lucene and Solr software in my opinion.

Then there is search history, but that’s no longer important or even interesting. This type of search marketing recycling amuses me, and I was an adviser to Exalead and one of the reviewers of the Search Based Applications book.

Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2017

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Marketing, News, Search

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.