There’s an old saying that to find out what’s really going on, you have to “follow the money”. In the search industry two recent events have pointed the way: firstly, Attivio raised $34 million in new funding. Attivio produce a solution based on their own Active Intelligence Engine (yes, it’s still just a search engine) which itself is based on open source projects such as Apache Lucene. Secondly, this week the new(ish) company formed to offer support for the ElasticSearch open source search engine also raised funding to the tune of $10m.
From these two events we can conclude that the smart money has realised that the enterprise search market is heading in only one direction – towards open source software or solutions mainly based on it (another good example being our partner LucidWorks). News from this week’s ApacheCon in Germany of incredibly busy sessions around Lucene, Solr and ElasticSearch (as well as related and complimentary projects such as Stanbol) shows that the technical community agrees. I don’t think this will be the last time we hear of a significant investment by both the financial and technical communities in open source search.
