Enterprise Search
JTeam’s focus on Enterprise Open Source Search Technologies has resulted in great projects like i-Local, Facet Search, Designer-Vintage, and contributions to various conferences as well as the open source community. We see that most re-hauls of customer-facing software require a search component and until now, no comprehensive open source solution exist. Core Open Source search technologies as Lucene and Solr do exist but they are lacking crucial tooling support and are considered to be too ‘raw’ to be used for system integration.
There are certainly some high-quality proprietary products available, but they carry a considerable price-tag, and come with hefty annual licences and Service Level Agreements (SLA). These product vendors have invested several years in their product development and enjoy a functional advance compared to any open source variant. Therefore, we’d like to clarify that we do not compete with them as a product vendor. We create customized search solutions based on a core open source technology stack. This technology stack is completed by our custom modules that offer essential tooling and easy integration support.
Our targeted consumers have an affinity to Open Source software and Open Standards. Open source software reflects your ‘open’ mindset but more importantly, it offers your organization more flexibility and better quality. Ideally, you have a (small) internal ICT department; we want to offer you our services (and technology) as empowerment. We will kick start the project with some of your staff developing side to side with us, but will be in control of the implementation for the first several months (typically through the first release). When all the major business and technical critical risks are eliminated, control of the technical project path is transitioned back to your organization. This way, you have all required knowledge to continue the project all alone.
A custom search solution from JTeam is a good fit to your organization if you:
- Have a huge collection of (unstructured or structured) information that needs to be accessible for various groups of end users.
- Need a (unique) solution instead of a product. We focus on providing solutions instead of selling a product. This implicitly indicates that we’re not changing your business problem to fit our product specification, but vice versa, i.e. we create the solution that fits your problem.
- Want a powerful yet simple solution. We do not have to deal with a history of complex products life cycles, version control of many modules, backwards compatibility issues, spaghetti/plumbing code and other bugbears of standard products. Our software is brand new (because it’s made for you alone), clean, and based on latest technologies and standards. This prolongs the life cycle of the source code belonging to your organization.
- Want to buy/build only what you will use: Most companies using off the shelf software end up using at max. 50% of the built in features and functions. The other unused 50% are not only paid for in license costs, but end up slowing the performance, and magnifying incompatibility issues down the road.
- Believe in open standards and open source. Your organization has a strong focus on adapting the open source paradigm because you see that it leads to a better, stronger and more stable product. Although cost savings (no license fees) are typically not the main reason to choose for open source, in this case it will definitely be. Licenses and SLA associated with commercial search products are considerably high and therefore most companies welcome the significant savings on total cost of ownership with a custom-built open source software solution.
Do you recognize your company above? Then please contact us for more information, or let us demonstrate our case studies.
Solr / Lucene expertise
Because JTeam is doing many custom search solutions, JTeam has a lot of expertise in most projects under the Apache Lucene umbrella, like Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Apache Hadoop, Apache Tika, and etcetera. We even provide training courses and workshops for most of these technologies.
Next to having a lot of experience and expertise, we are als involved in the development by commiting several patches and developing and contributing the Solr explorer.
If you are currently working on a project involving Lucene and/or Solr and need help, contact us! We might be of assistance.