Lucid Imagination is launching a cloud-based platform for search with connectors to Hadoop, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Sharepoint CMS.

LucidWorks Cloud is what the company calls a “Search as a Service” offering. It joins LucidWorks Enterprise and LucidWorks Certified Distributions to give users the choice of on-premise or in the cloud search platform. It is now in private beta. A general release has not been set.

Chief Marketing Officer Peter Tait said in an interview today that the service is intended for the mass of companies that are moving data to the cloud.  Search is becoming a front-end for big data apps and as a way to better find data from data warehouse offerings such as EMC Greenplum.

LucidWoks Cloud offers the same functionality as LucidWorks Enterprise. It is built on Apache Solr/Lucene open source technology. Tait said Lucid is using the latest yet released features in Apache/Solr for LucidWorks Cloud.

Services Angle

When we look at the enterprise search market, you have to wonder: “Where did it go?” The traditional players are really not there anymore.  Autonomy represented the last remaining offerings in the market. And now the company is getting swallowed by Hewlett-Packard. Who knows what kind of future it holds there.

The future for search is as a service. The load of data moving to the cloud is at a tipping point. It only makes sense to make that data available via search.