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Lucidworks, a provider of enterprise search solutions, announced the release of Fusion 2.0, the latest version of its flagship product that delivers integration with Apache Spark and provides search-based analytics.
Fusion 2.0 provides an organization with access to a streamlined, consumer-like search experience with enterprise-grade speed and scalability. The new release integrates Lucidworks’ Fusion with Apache Spark to enable real-time data analytics. Fusion 2.0 also features a new version of the company’s SiLK user interface (UI) that simplifies dashboard visualizations and enhances the user experience.
The SiLK UI runs on top of Fusion and the Apache Solr search platform, upon which Fusion is based. SiLK gives users the power to perform ad-hoc search and analysis of massive amounts of multi-structured and time series data. Users can swiftly transform their findings into visualizations and dashboards.
Will Hayes, CEO of Lucidworks, said the integration of Apache Spark extends search-based analytics capabilities and brings the power of real time streaming to Fusion. It also gives Fusion users access to Spark’s store of machine learning libraries that improve the relevancy of data-driven analytics. In addition, a new SiLK-powered user interface, the Fusion Dashboard, extends Fusion’s accessibility.
“We built Fusion to give our users the ability to create unlimited experiences around their data, regardless of their role within an organization,” Hayes said in a statement. “With our new interface, users are better equipped to utilize Fusion so they can create the applications they want for customers while expanding their understanding of their own data. We want to offer the best product to our users, and by integrating with Apache Spark we enable real-time analytics that complement our powerful search capabilities.”
Fusion 2.0 merges pre-existing user interfaces into one and the simplified workflow enhances the usability of Fusion for users that are less familiar with Solr’s architecture. It delivers an intuitive, streamlined way to vary and customize the information displayed according to the data requested. Fusion 2.0 also features security integration, using existing Kerberos, Active Directory, LDAP and SSO systems to manage authentication.
Lucidworks is the primary company behind the Apache Solr project, which is the most popular open-source search project under the Apache Foundation. The company has been providing Solr services and support for a number of years, but found a desire among customers to do more with Solr and to provide them with enterprise search capabilities. Lucidworks built Fusion as a natural extension to Solr as a solution for users that were looking for enterprise search capabilities that go beyond the open source, Hayes said.
The company employs many Solr experts and has contributed 70 percent of the project’s code, helping to improve and shape the direction of the project and software. Companies like Red Hat, Sears, Verizon, ADP, Raytheon, Qualcomm, Ford, MapR, eHarmony and Cisco, among others, rely on Lucidworks to power search inside their organizations.
Lucidworks Delivers Fusion 2.0 With Spark Integration
“Fusion 2.0 is continuing on this mission of making more of an organization’s data usable and crafting the user experience around data,” Hayes said. “More and more of what a satisfactory customer experience comes down to is getting to the right information. This means you can help resolve a help desk ticket faster or purchase an item faster or find an article or object they’re most interested in. And one of the ways we do that is by leveraging Apache Spark. Apache Spark, with its streaming capabilities is allowing us to process data in real time and use the results of that data processing to better weight the search results.”
The company has closed some significant deals in financial services, life sciences, technology services and online services, he added. Fusion 2.0 helps people leverage their data as part of driving better user experiences, particularly for areas like e-commerce and financial services.
“We help people create a data experience and drive users to the most productive data possible and apply it to things like fraud detection and customer service,” Hayes told eWEEK.
Hayes said Lucidworks is looking at Spark to help customers with fraud detection. For instance, if a company us watching for fraudulent transactions and they have a stream of data that says if a customer is fulfilling a prescription in two towns that are both 50 miles away from where this person lives and they’re happening within a certain timeframe, the system should process that as being a fraudulent transaction. With Spark that processing can be done in real-time, Hayes said. The system also can, as the application is being used, surface information that says this particular patient has been flagged for suspicious activity.
“Spark brings a number of other applications we are excited about,” Hayes said. “We are starting to get into more streaming analytics around data. So as you’re making decisions about how you want to curate a data experience within your application, there’s a lot that you can do with these real-time streams. For instance, if I’m processing social media and I’m looking for certain trends, and within those trends there are keywords that I want to use to surface information within my application, Spark gives us the ability to do what we’ve always done, which is rank these signals and understand them in terms of what’s important within the data sets that we’re serving up to our application. But now we’re doing it with a real-time capability as opposed to doing it with batch processing like we were doing it historically.”
In addition to being available from Lucidworks, Fusion is also available in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, making it available on the full spectrum of hosting options: on-premise, multi-tenant and cloud.