Consulting

LucidWorks provides expert consulting for Lucene and Solr technologies focused on architecture and design reviews, training, enablement, performance optimization and best practices. The LucidWorks consulting team consists of senior search technologists intimately familiar with Lucene/Solr technologies, with extensive experience in field-tested search solutions in diverse deployment scenarios.

By leveraging LucidWork's deep domain expertise, you can achieve rapid transfer of knowledge on Lucene and Solr technologies, faster application development cycles, and assurance of utilizing well tested sound architectural design principles. Our customers also gain economic efficiencies by avoiding lengthy ramp-up times and costly design errors due to inexperience.

Finally, by utilizing the LucidWorks team you can be rest assured that your application will be designed for optimal performance, which can have a direct positive impact on your business. LucidWorks has designed its support and search consulting services to address your business and technical goals. A range of support offerings is available to meet most companies' needs, with optimally packaged combinations of support and searchconsulting services. If you have more demanding or unique situations, we can also create custom packages to meet your specific needs.

The majority of consulting activities are conducted remotely to maintain cost-effectiveness.

When should LucidWorks Consulting be utilized?

LucidWork's Search consulting services can be beneficial at many points in the lifecycle of your search project.

Early Stage Evaluation: Key to the success of any search application is ensuring that the architectural design and configuration are grounded in best practices and align with the business and functional requirements. LucidWorks Solution Architect consultants can provide advice and recommendations for rapid and optimal development as well as deployment that ensure that:

• Your search application design meets business objectives
• Your search application effectively meets functional/technical requirements
• Best practices for indexing, searching and performance are utilized

Diagnostic Services: LucidWorks consulting services can cost effectively and rapidly analyze, troubleshoot and recommend fixes for complex search issues that arise from changes to  your application or the content you are searching. Specific areas that benefit from such diagnostic assessment can include:

• Indexing
• Query
• Advanced search functions such as spellchecking, faceting, "more-like-this", autosuggest/as-you-type
• Configuration
• Performance analysis
• Scalability and capacity planning

Periodic Assessment: LucidWork's search experts can perform a periodic assessment of your Lucene/Solr based application, to help you ensure know that your application is performing optimally to meet your business objectives. LucidWork's consulting team works through a provide a consistent, disciplined methodology of analysis designed to deliver optimum performance for search effectiveness, covering:

• Analyzing and optimizing Query response times
• Verifying accuracy and performance of data analysis and transformation
• Validating the search index integrity

Typical LucidWorks Consulting Engagement

Once you have completed a technical briefing with our engagement team, we will work with you to formulate a recommended approach to identifying your needs and requirements, and translating them into key focus areas. A typical engagement runs 5-7 days, not all consecutive, performed remotely to reduce your costs and accelerate the time you need to implement recommended improvements. Within these engagements, you can expect our experts to cover one or more of the following:

• Diagnostic/Assessment session
• Requirements analysis
• Architecture/Design review
• Benchmarking and baselining system attributes
• Best practices recommendations
• Tuning and performance optimizations

At the conclusion of the engagement, LucidWorks delivers a thorough architectural design report with recommendations tailored to your specific needs and environment. Implementation of the recommendations and optimizations is performed by your software development staff; if need be, we can recommend a  certified LucidWorks development partner to assist with implementation work as your require. Note that LucidWorks does not offer consulting on an ad-hoc hourly basis.

Many customers discover that the set of recommendations and assessments produced for their initial consulting agreement are only the first step in an ongoing effort to keep their search environment current with their marketplace and technology needs. For those who understand that effective search requires continuous tuning and evaluation, LucidWorks offers ExpertLink, an annual subscription which includes a package of consulting hours that serves as a continuation of your initial project engagement. ExpertLink also includes a support packages, available at various service levels, to assist you with responding to specific issues that emerge during development, deployment and in production.

How to Get Started

To determine which consulting package is best suited for your situation, please contact LucidWorks to arrange an initial requirements assessment. Once the discovery session is completed, LucidWorks will propose the consulting package for services and on-going support that best meet your needs and requirements.