Lucid Imagination, a company developed to support the open source Apache Solr/Lucene search engine, took a big step this week when it introduced LucidWorks Enterprise, a search platform built on top of Solr/Lucene. It has been designed to simplify the process of building an maintaining a Solr/Lucene search solution.

According to Brian Pinkerton, VP of product development at Lucid Imagination, the new product makes Apache Solr/Lucene more useful by providing some key components that are missing from the base, open source product today. 

The first provides connectors to data sources, giving enterprise users a way to get data into the Solr more easily. These could be web crawls, databases, file stores and so forth. Obviously being able to get data into the search application makes it much easier to build search applications around your content.

The second item is a set of Rest APIs that simplify Solr configuration. Typically, according to Pinkerton, you have to manually configure a Solr configuration file for a lot of common tasks and this removes that obstacle.

And finally, Lucid Imagination has built an administrative graphical user interface to simplify setup and maintenance of the search system.

Integrators that have had to struggle with Solr system tools see this as a way to take advantage of the open source environment while getting a set of tools to help make it more friendly for developers. Mike Vertal, president at River Logic, an open source enterprise systems integrator says it's the best of both worlds: An open source framework inside a well-packaged platform.

"The API layer makes it easy to integrate search into any application so we can quickly acquire content and data sources and automate critical operational tasks," Vertal said.

Lucid Imagination is being entirely transparent about pricing. The package is available on a subscription basis for $68,000 per year for a two-server license with an additional $1000 for each subsequent server.

For more information:
- see the Lucid Imagination press release

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