Lucidworks
Smart Search for Better Operational Intelligence

When enterprises look to bring a search engine into their business processes, they often struggle with a lack of in-house search expertise and data science that leads to the inability to gain insights from their users' behaviors or usage patterns within their applications. Founded by the team that created Apache Solr, Lucidworks is a San Francisco-based enterprise search solution provider that enables companies to reveal the intelligence behind their data using its highly scalable search engine that is built with the power of Solr. In a recent interview with Will Hayes, CEO of Lucidworks, we discuss how enterprise search provides expertise around data sciences.

How does Lucidworks differentiate itself from other enterprise search organizations?

If the answer were as simple as ‘indexing data and sticking it into a search engine tool,’ there would be no need to turn to companies like Lucidworks. The company is built around the principle of smart data driving smart applications. What sets the firm apart from its competitors is the search technology that not only retrieves and delivers data to applications but also ranks the information by its relevance to the user’s query. This is what gives the platform the ability to drive more context and personalization around the data. The company has made the leap towards smarter applications and nearly 250 major Fortune 1000 enterprises today are realizing the power and potential of smart applications with Lucidworks’ platform.

What are the features and functionalities of the solution?

The firm’s product stack is called Fusion and has three main sets of capabilities. The first focus of Fusion is a robust and highly scalable search server designed to store up to a trillion events and process billions of records per second. The second set of capabilities uses machine learning and AI, to provide recommendations, personalization, and even enables customers to have editorial control over their data. The third focus is an app studio for customers to build and deploy UI on top of data applications within minutes. This set of components was originally created by Twigkit, a partner based in the UK. Lucidworks recently acquired Twigkit and brought the UI technology directly into Fusion.

How does Lucidworks enable its users to streamline their workflows?

Lucidworks’ robust SDK acquisition framework includes over 60 programs that work with a variety of systems and data stores. It also includes the ability to enrich data, giving customers the option to further transform their data. Once the data is processed, it is stored on either the customer’s or Lucidworks’ secure servers, which are auto-scaling and secure. At this point, customers can decide how they want their data to be served—it can be programmatic, through machine learning or manually segregated. In the latter, customers have the opportunity to input rules that the program needs to follow. The algorithms are continuously learning, enriching and enhancing the data, to constantly produce the best results for the end-users.

How do customers integrate Lucidworks’ enterprise search application in their ecosystem?

When prospective customers approach Lucidworks for the Fusion solution, the first goal is to understand the outcomes that the customers are trying to drive for their users. Lucidworks draws from a wealth of experience that it has amassed across multiple verticals and customers to formulate a plan to support its customers. With professional services as part of the deal, Lucidworks works have the materials and tools to help customers frame their priorities. However, most of the deployment can be done in less than three weeks, as long as the customer knows the outcomes they want to drive between their users and data.

For instance, a major financial institution approached Lucidworks for its Fusion solution because their systems were neither scalable, nor could provide the right information to their wealth managers. Lucidworks went beyond providing the traditional simple search engine to a single application/ single interface. Now wealth managers could oversee customer portfolios, and monitor their activity on the company’s website. Essentially, this gives wealth managers a 360-degree view of the business that allows them to retrieve information to help them serve their clients proactively.

What are your plans pertaining to new solutions that could play a role in the company’s offerings?

The company plans to introduce its platform as a simple and fast service, by taking all the complexity out of the platform. Launching in the first quarter of 2018, the platform will leverage the power of machine learning and the algorithms Lucidworks has used for ranking, relevancy, and personalization through simple APIs that will be embedded in client ecosystems or their own cloud applications. Lucidworks aims to support hybrid cloud environments shortly, enabling customers to utilize its platform across multiple storage locations. The firm is moving towards micro-services and servable architectures that can be delivered in any form that customers desire, without sacrificing rich functionality and capability.