It’s always fun to make predictions about the future, especially as one can be pretty sure to be proved wrong in interesting ways. At the start of 2014 we at Flax are looking forward to another year of building open source search and we already have some great client projects in progress that we’ll shortly be able to talk about, but what else might be happening this year? Here’s some points to note:
- The Elasticsearch project continues to add features at a prodigious rate during the arms race between it and Apache Solr – this battle can only be good news for end users in our view. We can expect a 1.0 release of Elasticsearch this year and several further major 4.x releases of Solr.
- The Solr world has become slightly more complex as original author Yonik Seeley has left Lucidworks to start his own company, Heliosearch – with its own packaged distribution of Solr. How will Heliosearch contribute to the Solr ecosystem?
- HP Autonomy is a sponsor of the Enterprise Search Europe conference this year, although there’s still some fallout from HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, and little news from the various official investigations into this process. Perhaps this year HP’s overall strategy will become a little clearer.
- The Big Data bandwagon rolls on and more or less every search company now stresses its capabilities in this area for marketing purposes: but how big is Big? It’s not enough just to re-quote IDC’s latest study on how many exobytes everyone is producing these days, the value is in the detail, not the sheer volume: good (and deep) analytics is the key.
- We think there might be some interesting things happening around open source search and bioinformatics soon – watch this space!
