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Jun. 19, 2009

In-Q-Tel, the IT company that provides security technology to the CIA has invested in an open-source company to supply complex enterprise-search technology to the U.S. intelligence agency and other similar organizations around the world.

In-Q-Tel is now investing in Lucid Imagination, which provides support, maintenance, training and add-on software for the Apache Software Foundation's Lucene and Solr search projects.

Lucene is an information retrieval library that can be used for full-text indexing and search. Solr is an enterprise-search server based on Lucene.

The two companies didn't disclose the exact nature of the investment but said that it is aimed at making Lucid's open-source enterprise-search software more prevalent in the U.S. intelligence community.

Anil Uberoi, marketing officer for In-Q-Tel said "you can think of us as the Red Hat of Lucene, providing online support and maintenance to customers who want to use Lucene and Solr for enterprise search."

Many of the leading developers who commit code to those projects are the founding technical members of In-Q-Tel.

The firm handles technology requisitions for eighteen organizations, including the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community at large, Uberoi said. Many of these organizations have wanted to use the Apache Lucene and Solr projects to do enterprise search, but were hesitant to do so without official vendor backing, he said.

Lucid officially launched over four months ago after securing initial funding in October of 2008. "They were nervous about not having a commercial entity to support this," Uberoi added.

Indeed, search analyst Stephen Arnold in a blog post said that several intelligence organizations already have been using Lucene and Solr for enterprise search, and having Lucid to back their investments gives it the green light for more mission-critical applications.

"With Lucid, a well-funded commercial entity offering certified distributions of Lucene and Solr, SLA-based support subscriptions, training, high-level consulting and value-added software, both new and existing users now have access to enterprise-grade support and services to optimize their enterprise search efforts," he wrote.

According to Lucid, the Lucene/Solr technology is downloaded about 9,100 to 9,400 times per day, and more than 4,000 organizations are using the software for enterprise search.

Source: OS Review.

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