Lucid positioning for success in open source search

Lucid Imagination is the Redwood Shores company whose charter is to market advanced products based on the open source Lucene/Solr project. With a large number of the Apache project committers in its employ, they have the technical wherewithal to succeed, but they never really screamed 'business success' - until recently.

In December of last year, Lucid's board hired Paul Doscher as CEO, presumably to make Lucid's premier product, LucidWorks Enterprise, a success in the marketplace. He seems to have been a good choice: he was the guy at Exalead who built a first-class organization in the US; and who was as responsible as anyone in making Exalead an attractive acquisition last summer for Dassault. 

Now, just a few months later, Paul has hired Mike Moody, formerly of Spigit, to be Lucid's EVP of Development. I had the opportunity last year to work with Mike at Spigit, an up-and-coming product in its own right, and I suspect having Mike on-board will have a positive impact on Lucid's products and services in the coming years.

It's tough to break into the commercial search market, but it seems to me that Lucid is serious about being a leader in the space - soon.