Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Solr search technology, today announced the latest version of LucidWorks, the cutting edge platform that accelerates and simplifies the development of highly accurate, scalable and cost-effective search applications.
 
LucidWorks Platform 2.0 delivers full open source Apache Lucene/Solr community innovation in an enterprise-ready package, with support from the world’s leading experts in open source search. An extensible platform architected for developers, it is the only Solr distribution that provides security, pre-built connectors for essential enterprise data sources, along with dramatic ease of use advantages in a well-tested, integrated, and documented package. LucidWorks is now available for on-premise and cloud deployment, giving companies the option of actionable information and insights without requiring datacenter real estate.
 
Thousands of companies big and small are using Lucene/Solr in mission-critical applications related to new media, e-commerce, embedded search applications, content management, social media, and security and intelligence. Organizations as diverse as Boeing, EMC Corporation, Zappos, National Institutes of Health, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Qualcomm Inc., Time Inc., Comcast, Twitter, LinkedIn, eHarmony Inc., General Electric Company, Verizon, Motorola Mobility Inc., General Dynamics, SAIC, Careerbuilder.com, and many more use open source search-enabled applications to quickly access enterprise data and content without spending millions of dollars on proprietary offerings to do so.
 
Streamlined Search Setup and Management
With today’s announcement, Lucid Imagination advances the industry a step further, delivering Lucene/Solr technology in a format that spearheads its adoption and deployment for enterprise application use. By introducing crucial out of the box functionality for enterprise-grade security, and time saving operational and upgrade tools that streamline search configuration, deployment and operations, LucidWorks accelerates the transformation of search from a legacy application to a versatile platform for universal data access and dissemination.
 
A new administrative console delivers intuitive, simplified control of search quality and user behaviors, with configuration and tuning of crawlers and index fields, stopwords, boosting, stemming, field parameters and settings, faceting options, as well as user management, security, and user experience options to accelerate and simplify search application development and tuning.
 
The new LucidWorks platform also gives IT staff new tools for configuring and maintaining open source search in the enterprise data center. It integrates with common commercial application management tools, along with Open Source tools such as JMX, Zabbix and Nagios, delivering integrated application level statistics and performance data consistent with any IT operational environment.
 
Access Big Data and Enterprise Content Faster and More Securely
LucidWorks indexes, searches and makes sense of data securely from a wide array of sources, with out of the box support for databases, filesystems, Microsoft Sharepoint CMS Search Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and Amazon EC2 S3 cloud storage.  
 
An extensible connector framework allows customers and partners to build new connectors and publish the connector configuration, making any enterprise data source accessible. Flexible, resilient, built-in security simplifies the process, providing integrated end-to-end management of security across data and content sources plus optional encryption across communications within infrastructure.
 
Companies working with Big Data technologies like Hadoop are increasingly finding that using Lucene/Solr search is the perfect way to interact with these huge new data sets. The new Hadoop HDFS connector traverses the HDFS file system hierarchy according to specified parameters and retrieves files for indexing, with support for HDFS permissions, thereby enabling robust, efficient search processing of files in the Hadoop cluster.
 
The Latest in Open Source Innovation, With Enterprise Support
LucidWorks Platform 2.0 is built on Lucene/Solr 4, and delivers fully-supported functionality not available in the standard Apache releases. Near real-time search, for example, means new data can be found within seconds of publication, for Twitter-like speeds in big, fast-changing content streams.
 
The latest version of LucidWorks Enterprise is available immediately for download. LucidWorks Cloud is currently available in private beta.