Just read an article posted on the Lucene blog - “Lucene and the Corporate Environment”
If the list of companies using Lucene are not “corporate” environments, then I don’t know what corporate means. If by corporate packaging, you mean it has a lot of bloat and charges exorbitant license fees, then no, unfortunately, Lucene is not ready to succeed in the corporate environment. If by corporate environment, it means it is used to save time/money/energy, then Lucene should break out the khakis and button-down shirt and start punching the clock.
Before I go on with this rant, I want to say that I love lucene/solr as what they have to offer and I myself have been using / customizing / delivering innovative solutions based on lucene since 2001. But after spending years with other enterprise search products and lucene / solr, I agree with the statement that Lucene/Solr still have some ways to go to make it really easy for the corporate/enterprise adoption.
One of the things I see in a leading enterprise solution is that it is relatively easy to see value of the product after the installation and it does not require a bunch of hackers to get it up and running. From where I am looking, most of the companies deploying a Solr/Lucene based solution requires programmers who understand IR/Search on their payroll to get the system running.
In a decent sized deployment, there needs to be infrastructure work on monitoring / replication, performance, etc - which in other enterprise search products is mostly built in.
For corporates who have data in their various Silos (DBs, file systems, intranet), Solr/Lucene does not yet provide the full suite of connectors to ingest that data. There are connectors, but again, one has to understand them, their use and how to integrate into Solr/Lucene. Good enterprise software solutions provide management interfaces to configure connectors along with a variety of connector choices (commercial and open source).
Yes, Lucene/Solr is a great platform for companies who want to go above and beyond in delivering value but having the right expertise in house is a key to success. And yes, there is some work needed for Solr/Lucene so that it’s an easy deployment for enterprises.
From what I’m seeing, all those companies using FAST, Endeca, etc. have programmers working on them too. Now, if you just want dead simple crawling and indexing without any thought to it, then, Solr isn’t it right now. But make no mistake, as soon as you have any _VENDOR_ search doing anything interesting, you have plenty of people involved who understand IR/Search.
Are those people really programmers or average IT folks who are good at configuration and installation?
The last place I saw FAST at, a FAST team had to come in and spend a *couple weeks* setting everything up and showing how everything worked. So sure, you either have to have expertise in house, or pay a few hundred thousand dollars to have the expertise brought to your house. There is no free lunch either way. Huge, scalable search solutions are not plug and play - those companies just want you to think they are. Marketing BS.