Authored by Brian Babineau, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Strategy Group
Over much of this decade, many organizations turned to open source solutions when developing an application requiring search or when adding search capabilities to an existing information repository. The rationale in using open source was straightforward: it was free and it provided "good enough" functionality, namely the ability to find a specific document through a web-like user experience. Entering a keyword and getting a list of results seemed like a reasonable way to address search requirements. However, ESG reports that developers soon realized that most open source search solutions, including Lucene and Lucene-based offerings, required some level of customization — an expense that was not considered when selecting this technology in the first place. The limitations of traditional enterprise search—the need for users to have some idea of what they are looking for and where to look and the inability to execute queries across multiple sources-is driving the need for more advanced solutions. To streamline business processes and ensure all relevant information is made available for decision-making and service delivery, information must be automatically detected and delivered to not only knowledge workers, but to business processes as well. This paper examines the new information access functionality and administrative requirements — including enterprise concerns for scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance — while measuring the ability of current open source alternatives to meet these demands. ESG also investigates the financial aspects of open source search adoption to ensure organizations consider all costs of a solution, not just a license fee, when making their next investment. |