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July 22, 2015

Fusion Upgrade Boosts Search Analytics

Lucidworks rolled out version 2.0 of its Fusion enterprise search application this week that includes a new user interface and redesigned UI workflows. The upgrade also is intended to make it easier for users to create and configure the search application, particularly for new users or those unfamiliar with the Solr architecture.

Fusion sits on top of the open source Solr engine that is included in most distributions of Hadoop along with other enterprise applications.

The updated Fusion UI also includes a rebuilt Silk dashboard, which incorporates the updated Silk dashboard framework based on Kibana 4, the company said in a blog posted on Tuesday (July 21).

The 2.0 release also integrates hierarchical facet management, a feature designed to allow administrators and developers to change how search queries return data, depending on browser results. It is also intended as a way to streamline, vary and customize information displayed based on the data requested.

“The most straightforward use of this is to select different facets and fields according to, for example, the category or section that user is looking at,” Lucidworks said.

Fusion is “not just about that retrieval of data at scale, but the context we can provide on top of the data,” CEO Will Hayes told Datanami last fall when Fusion was introduced. “It’s the fact that search engines are aware of who you are, your history, what devices you’re on, your geo-location. It’s the ability to create a contextual data experience for your users.”

In the background, the company also has been making incremental performance and stability improvements around integrations with external security systems like Kerberos, Active Directory, LDAP and Sharepoint.

While supporting Solr 5.x, Fusion 2.0 also will be shipped with Solr 5.x built in. The company added it is planning additional features around Apache Spark processing, deep learning and systems operations.

Fusion is geared toward Hadoop and the massive volumes of information that organizations are beginning to store there. The NoSQL-based Solr search engine is already heavily embedded within Hadoop, hence Lucidworks is betting its presence will promote mass Fusion adoption.

Hayes stressed when Fusion was introduce that it was designed to probe “these massive data stores like Hadoop to not only make it accessible, but put context around it.”

According to the company, the integration of Apache Spark is designed to extend search-based analytics capabilities while adding real-time streaming to Fusion. The upgrade also gives Fusion users access to Spark’s store of machine learning libraries designed to improve the relevancy of data analytics.

Lucidworks said Fusion 2.0 is available now from the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, hence an instance of Fusion can be launched in the AWS cloud.

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