TNR Global’s New Relationship with Lucid Imagination Adds Value for Clients

“Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR

Late last April 2012, TNR Global entered into a strategic relationship with California’s Lucid Imagination. One of the many benefits to this alliance is that in addition to the integration services TNR has historically offered, clients now can obtain enterprise class search platforms designed by Lucid Imagination and integrated by TNR Global’s search team. “Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR.  “Lucid’s product offerings are solid and they have a range of options that we can now offer by way of our relationship with them. They round out our services and solutions very nicely.”  Details on Lucid Imagination’s enterprise class search platform can be viewed at Lucid Imagination’s website.
TNR still provides customized integration for search including Lucene Solr as well as other open source and commercial products. “When a client approaches us with a problem they need solved, we always look at what they need most out of a solution. During our evaluation period, we look at a number of factors. One solution doesn’t always do the trick–we always suggest what is best for the client based on their particular circumstance.”  This strategy allows TNR to offer a range of solutions, including support.  “Now that we are in a relationship with Lucid, we have even more options–and having choices is good for our clients.” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development.
TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions focusing on companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com
About Lucid Imagination
Lucid Imagination is the only company that delivers an enterprise-grade search development platform built on the power of Apache Lucene/Solr open source search. Out of the 35 Core Committers to the Apache Lucene/Solr project, 9 individuals work for Lucid Imagination, making the company the largest supporter of open source search in the industry. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, Cisco, Zappos, Raytheon, The Guardian, The Smithsonian Institution, Salesforce.com, The Motley Fool, Qualcomm, Taser, eHarmony and many other household names around the world. Lucid Imagination investors include Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Walden International, and In-Q-Tel. Learn more about the company at www.lucidimagination.com
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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com
Late last April 2012, TNR Global entered into a strategic relationship with California’s Lucid Imagination. One of the many benefits to this alliance is that in addition to the integration services TNR has historically offered, clients now can obtain enterprise class search platforms designed by Lucid Imagination and integrated by TNR Global’s search team. “Lucid’s products expand upon open source tools to offer many additional features and extensive support on their product line” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies for TNR.  “Lucid’s product offerings are solid and they have a range of options that we can now offer by way of our relationship with them. They round out our services and solutions very nicely.”  Details on Lucid Imagination’s enterprise class search platform can be viewed at Lucid Imagination’s website.
TNR still provides customized integration for search including Lucene Solr as well as other open source and commercial products. “When a client approaches us with a problem they need solved, we always look at what they need most out of a solution. During our evaluation period, we look at a number of factors. One solution doesn’t always do the trick–we always suggest what is best for the client based on their particular circumstance.”  This strategy allows TNR to offer a range of solutions, including support.  “Now that we are in a relationship with Lucid, we have even more options–and having choices is good for our clients.” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development.
TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions focusing on companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com
About Lucid Imagination
Lucid Imagination is the only company that delivers an enterprise-grade search development platform built on the power of Apache Lucene/Solr open source search. Out of the 35 Core Committers to the Apache Lucene/Solr project, 9 individuals work for Lucid Imagination, making the company the largest supporter of open source search in the industry. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, Cisco, Zappos, Raytheon, The Guardian, The Smithsonian Institution, Salesforce.com, The Motley Fool, Qualcomm, Taser, eHarmony and many other household names around the world. Lucid Imagination investors include Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Walden International, and In-Q-Tel. Learn more about the company at www.lucidimagination.com
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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com

TNR Global of Hadley, MA Forms Strategic Relationship with California-based Lucid Imagination

“This relationship indicates our commitment to Apache Lucene/Solr open source search and other related embedded search applications,” said Michael McIntosh

lucid imagination logo

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Hadley, MA–May 29, 2012— TNR Global announced they are entering into a relationship with California based Lucid Imagination, to help businesses and organizations improve search technology and functionality within their digital infrastructure. As part of the agreement, TNR Global will provide the option of Lucid’s products, training, and support services to their clients.

Partners are selected for their deep technology expertise in web and search application development, and experience in market focus areas.

While TNR will still remain search vendor “neutral” to provide a wide variety of technologies–both open source and commercial—to their clients, the relationship is a bold move in support of open source search.ce in market focus areas.  “This relationship indicates our commitment to Apache Lucene/Solr open source search and other related embedded search applications,” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search technologies for TNR Global. “We’re excited to have direct access to the core development team for Apache/Solr,” he continued.  “Lucene/Solr has become a mature product and we’re confident in its performance for many applications, large and small.

Lucid’s selection process for this level of relationship is based upon technology focus and expertise.  “Our partners deliver complementary products and services and apply their proven expertise in a variety of industries and technology disciplines to solve even the toughest search application challenges and to implement successful Lucene/Solr projects.”

TNR Global’s executive team attended the Partner Summit at the Lucene Revolution Conference, a technology conference dedicated to the open source search technology built on Apache/Lucene Solr held in Cambridge, Massachusetts to learn about the latest LucidWorks Platform release and to meet the new CEO of Lucid Imagination, Paul Doscher.

“We’ve attended Lucene Revolution conference in May as Gold Sponsors just after solidifying our relationship with Lucid. Further, we have recently published a definitive white paper on the topic of migrating from a commercial search engine to Lucene/Solr. We feel very confident, well positioned, and supported in the marketplace to handle projects of any scope,” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development for TNR Global.

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions focusing on companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com

About Lucid Imagination

Lucid Imagination is the only company that delivers an enterprise-grade search development platform built on the power of Apache Lucene/Solr open source search. Out of the 35 Core Committers to the Apache Lucene/Solr project, 9 individuals work for Lucid Imagination, making the company the largest supporter of open source search in the industry. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, Cisco, Zappos, Raytheon, The Guardian, The Smithsonian Institution, Salesforce.com, The Motley Fool, Qualcomm, Taser, eHarmony and many other household names around the world. Lucid Imagination investors include Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Walden International, and In-Q-Tel. Learn more about the company at www.lucidimagination.com

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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com

New Systems and DevOps Blog

has lots of new approaches to discuss in terms of systems, cloud computing, DevOps, System Architecture, and how developers and systems staff need to communicate well and work together

Our VP of Systems Administration, Michael Klatsky has started a blog specifically discussing Systems.  Fresh from the AWS Summit 2012 in NYC, Michael has lots of new approaches to discuss in terms of systems, cloud computing, DevOps, System Architecture, and how developers and systems staff need to communicate well and work together for the best results in web development.  The blog is his own but we feel it’s a great technical resource for our colleagues in systems and web development.  You can take a look at his blog here. Michael welcomes commentary and discussion, and hopes to provide some shortcuts for fellow System Administrators.

TNR Global Helps Northampton’s Myers Information Systems Streamline Systems in the Cloud

“TNR Global did an outstanding job and we were impressed with their professionalism, industry knowledge and fee structure. We would certainly recommend them to anyone who was seeking to improve their enterprise search and/or cloud computing solutions.”

Hadley, MA–March 27, 2012–TNR Global announced today the successful completion of a cloud based solution for Northampton headquartered broadcasting communications company Myers Information Systems.

Myers engaged with TNR to move their systems into the cloud to improve their technical agility as well as to improve security, redundancy and promote these improvements to potential customers.

“As we set out to upgrade our existing application hosting service (ProHost), we prioritized the need to adopt the highest levels of security protocols. In addition, we sought to streamline the technology stack so that transaction speeds could be optimized while at the same time set-up and annual maintenance costs reduced. Our clients count on us to be proactive when it comes to adopting new standards and technology…not only to modernize our offerings over time but to increase productivity and lower operating expenses on their end as well.” said Crist Myers, President and CEO of Myers Information Systems.

Cloud based solutions for businesses have been growing rapidly over the last 3 years. Cloud technology offers increased flexibility, elasticity and scalability which allow businesses to maximize efficiencies to serve the needs of the business. Using the cloud in combination with virtualization techniques, businesses like Myers Information Systems can leverage rapid deployments and hardware efficiencies. Companies can get more value from every server by increasing the utilization rate of their servers, drastically reducing the number of servers they need to purchase and manage.

TNR was tasked to provide an assessment of Myers systems, give recommendations based upon their needs, and to provide reference implementation and documentation.

“We created a reference system and the documentation to allow them to deploy their own systems based on that reference by using Open Stack and Rackspace Cloud” said Michael Klatsky, the VP of Systems Administration and technical lead on the project from TNR Global.

As a result they can rapidly launch a new system for a client with all the tools they need in place and they have enhanced disaster recovery capability. This allows Myers to be agile in a more secure environment, and leave them better equipped to respond to their rapidly expanding market in broadcasting.

“Myers had been relying on physical servers housed locally or on site. With this cloud based virtualization, they will be able to save money and quickly deploy additional servers based in the cloud to service new clients immediately.” said Klatsky.

“TNR Global did an outstanding job and we were impressed with their professionalism, industry knowledge and fee structure. We would certainly recommend them to anyone who was seeking to improve their enterprise search and/or cloud computing solutions.” said Myers.

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions for content intensive websites for companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com

Myers Information Systems, Inc. has been developing broadcast management software since 1989. The Company provides technology and services for television, radio and other digital media providers designed to improve every aspect of their operations, from media management to scheduling, and from trafficking to reconciliation. For more information, please visit: www.myersinfosys.com

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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com

TNR Global to be Gold Sponsors of Lucene Revolution 2012 Boston

“We are thrilled to be Gold Sponsors at Lucene Revolution.” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development. “TNR Global has been a supporter of Apache Lucene/Solr for three years now and we are excited to be a part of the Solr community.”

Hadley, MA–March 26, 2012 TNR Global announced today that they will be sponsoring the Lucene Revolution Boston this year held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA.

“We are thrilled to be Gold Sponsors at Lucene Revolution.” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.  “TNR Global has been supporters of Apache Lucene/Solr for three years now and we are excited to be a part of the Solr community.”

The conference, which is the largest conference dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search technology community, is in it’s 3rd year.  TNR has sponsored the conference beginning in 2010.  The conference will attract 400+ attendees and will offer training, presentations, trade show, and opportunities to socialize with the vibrant Lucene Solr community.

The conference will be held May 7-10, 2012

TNR invites all attendees to stop by the conference table to sign up for the free White Paper on one of our primary focuses:  Migrating from Fast ESP to Apache Lucene Solr.  Meet one of the authors of the paper and discuss the ways Lucene Solr can power search in the organization.  Representatives from TNR will be on hand to meet, chat, and discuss the many advantages of Solr for search.

“We’re looking forward to meeting others in the Solr community.  We expect the conference to be one of the high points of our year.” said Lynn.

Fast to Lucene Solr: Choosing a Document Processing Pipeline for Solr

If we want to leverage the power that Solr offers, but we need support for a more robust document processing framework, what are our options?

One of the most powerful features of FAST ESP is its flexible document processing engine. The engine that ships with FAST ESP supports multiple document processing pipelines that comprise of multiple document processing stages. A document processing stage performs a document processing task and can add, modify or remove elements from a document before it is passed to the next stage in the pipeline. A simple example of processing stage would be one that processes a document’s URL element, ESP ships with many processing stages and several processing pipelines out of the box for handling both structured and unstructured documents. FAST ESP document processing engine also provides a Python plugin API to allow customers to create custom processing stages of their own, which is a feature we use heavily for our customer ESP installations.

Unfortunately, Solr does not offer the same robust support for document processing pipelines that ESP does. The ESP processing pipeline is document-centric while the Lucene Solr platform is field-centric. When a document is fed to ESP for processing, it is routed to processing stages in a processing pipeline that can access document elements generated by previous processing stages. This allows for complex and optimal operations that can leverage previous processing, such as reuse of a previously generated HTML DOM tree structures. When a document is passed to a Solr update handler, the document is broken up into a set of individual fields. Each field can have a set of processors known as Solr Analysis Filter that can be chained together for field processing before indexing occurs. While this is fine for content that has been heavily processed before being sent to Solr, individual filters lack the same level of access to other documents elements to easily support more complex processing behaviors.

Another difference between ESP and Solr platforms is that ESP’s document processing architecture allows it to be scaled independently from its indexing architecture. ESP’s document processing architecture is fully decoupled from its indexing architecture and is designed out-of-the-box to take advantage of multiple processor cores per machine and multiple document processor machines per cluster. Solr’s out-of-the-box document processing architecture is tightly coupled with its indexing architecture, making it difficult to independently scale Solr’s content processing capacity without adding the complexity and overhead of additional Solr services and Lucene indexes. When we work with multiple terabyte document sets, we find content processing tends to be the biggest bottleneck, so being able to scale content processing ability separately from indexing is mission critical.

If we want to leverage the power that Solr offers, but we need support for a more robust document processing framework, what are our options? There are quite a number of content processing frameworks we can chose from that we discovered during the course of our research. Some of the options currently available include, but are not limited to OpenPipeline OpenPipe, Pypes, UIMA, SMILA , Apache Commons Pipeline, Piped, Behemoth, and Cascading.

Most of these frameworks are written in Java which gives them access to an incredibly broad and diverse spectrum of Java libraries. Since Solr and Lucene are also written in Java, it might make a lot of sense to favor a Java processing framework from scratch, especially if you are more comfortable with Java as a programming language.

Since our clients tend to have highly customized document processing pipelines with many custom FAST ESP Python processing stages, we are heavily biased towards choosing a framework that minimizes the amount of code that would need to be migrated. Many of the available processing frameworks are written in Java, which would be fine if you prefer using Java and don’t have a large amount of currently working Python code to migrate. For our use cases, the decision of which framework to chose was incredibly simple given the option, so we chose Pypes for our migration solution.

For a full report on how we use Pypes for a Document Processing Engine including sample code, sign up for our free FAST to Lucene Solr White Paper here.

Elasticsearch Evaluation White Paper Released: Promising for Big Data

We believe that Elasticsearch is a product that everyone working in the field of big data will want to take a look at.

There are many new technologies emerging around search, and we’ve been investigating several of them for our clients. Search has never been “easy” but Elasticsearch attempts to make it at least easier. Elasticsearch is billed to be “built for the cloud,” and with so many companies moving into the cloud, it seems like a natural that search would move there too.  This paper is designed to show you just how Elasticsearch works by setting up a cluster and feeding it data.  We also let you know what tools we use so you can test out the technology and we include a rough sketch of code as well. Finally, we make conclusions about how Elasticsearch can help with problems like Big Data and other search related uses.

Elasticsearch is an open source technology developed by one developer, Shay Bannon. This paper is simply a first look at elasticsearch and is not associated with an additonal product or variation of elaticsearch. The appeal for big data is due to elasticsearch’s wonderful ability to scale with growing content, which has largely been associated with the “big data problem” we all keep hearing about. It’s very easy to add new nodes and it handles the balancing of your data across the available nodes. It handles the failure of nodes in a graceful way that is important in a cloud environment. And lastly, we simply evaluate and test the technology. We really don’t believe there is a one size fits all technology in the realm of enterprise search, it is really highly dependent upon your systems, how many documents you have, how much unstructured data you have, and how you want your site to function. But that said– in terms of storing big data, it is as capable as any Lucene based product; it can handle a much larger load that the current Solr release as the notion of breaking the index up into smaller chunks is “baked in” to the product.

Here is an except from the paper:

“Products like Elasticsearch that lack a document processing component entirely become more attractive. In fact, most projects that involve a data set large enough to qualify as “big data”³² are building their own document processing stages anyway as part of their ETL cycle.”

If you are interested in downloading this free White Paper, sign up with us here.

If you would like help using Elasticsearch with your search project, contact us.

For Many Companies, Migration to a New Search Engine is Inevitable

HADLEY, MA– March 12, 2012

In the world of Enterprise Search, everything is changing.  Companies who have been using Microsoft’s internal search engine, FAST Enterprise Search Platform, will be forced to make a change as Microsoft discontinues support for the search platform for companies using Linux as their operating system.  Anticipating the need for a solution, local technology consultants TNR Global is pleased to announce the release of a White Paper for migrating off FAST ESP to a new search engine, Solr.  The paper is titled Bridging the Gap: A Migration Path from Fast ESP to Apache Solr.

This effort began last October when TNR Global presented on the subject of migration from FAST to Solr at the open source conference, Apache Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain. The paper contains a case study with architecture overview, loading millions of documents into Solr indexes, evaluation and recommendation of tools to bridge the feature gap, migrating custom pipeline code, and the vastly improved ROI after implementation.  “It’s basically a road map for companies looking at options for migration, and we outline Solr as a very good option” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.

“We have spent over 9 years working with the FAST ESP product and we understand the nuances of what customers have come to expect from the technology. We’ve identified Solr as a top choice for migrating off FAST as support for the product drops off” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies and lead author of the paper. “Solr is an open source technology that has matured and is certainly stable enough for commercial use” said Chris Miles, Senior Software Engineer and contributor to the paper. “We’re excited about this migration option for our customers, and we believe over the long run, it will save them a lot of money and give them greater control over their search engine.”

This heavily anticipated paper will assist companies and organizations in planning their own FAST ESP to Apache Solr migrations and alert them to tools and techniques that can help them achieve a relatively painless process.  Several large blue chip companies have expressed interest in the paper.  “We’ve had a healthy response to the paper” said Lynn.

Internal search engines differ from public search engines like Google or Bing, in that an internal search engine only searches for content inside the company’s firewall.  Google cannot access internal content, therefore companies use search technology to make their content ‘findable.’ “Companies want to keep internal information safe and private.  But they still need to find it” explained Lynn.  “That’s why they need search technology integrated into their organization’s system.”

For more information on search engines, product search, web portals and search engine migration, visit TNR’s main website.  To receive a free copy of the white paper, click here.

TNR Global www.tnrglobal.com, is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions for publishing companies, news sites, web directories, academia, enterprise, and SaaS companies. TNR’s past clients include the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mass Art & Culture, InterNano, Innovara, and the Allegis Group. TNR Global is located at 245 Russell Street, Suite 10 in Hadley, Massachusetts. TNR Global serves clients throughout New England, nationally, and world-wide. Its offices are in Hadley and Greenfield, Massachusetts.

For Many Companies, Migration to a New Search Engine is Inevitable

“It’s basically a road map for companies looking at options for migration, and we outline Solr as a very good option”

HADLEY, MA– March 12, 2012

In the world of Enterprise Search, everything is changing.  Companies who have been using Microsoft’s internal search engine, FAST Enterprise Search Platform, will be forced to make a change as Microsoft discontinues support for the search platform for companies using Linux as their operating system.  Anticipating the need for a solution, local technology consultants TNR Global is pleased to announce the release of a White Paper for migrating off FAST ESP to a new search engine, Solr.  The paper is titled Bridging the Gap: A Migration Path from Fast ESP to Apache Solr.

This effort began last October when TNR Global presented on the subject of migration from FAST to Solr at the open source conference, Apache Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain. The paper contains a case study with architecture overview, loading millions of documents into Solr indexes, evaluation and recommendation of tools to bridge the feature gap, migrating custom pipeline code, and the vastly improved ROI after implementation.  “It’s basically a road map for companies looking at options for migration, and we outline Solr as a very good option” said Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.

“We have spent over 9 years working with the FAST ESP product and we understand the nuances of what customers have come to expect from the technology. We’ve identified Solr as a top choice for migrating off FAST as support for the product drops off” said Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies and lead author of the paper. “Solr is an open source technology that has matured and is certainly stable enough for commercial use” said Chris Miles, Senior Software Engineer and contributor to the paper. “We’re excited about this migration option for our customers, and we believe over the long run, it will save them a lot of money and give them greater control over their search engine.”

This heavily anticipated paper will assist companies and organizations in planning their own FAST ESP to Apache Solr migrations and alert them to tools and techniques that can help them achieve a relatively painless process.  Several large blue chip companies have expressed interest in the paper.  “We’ve had a healthy response to the paper” said Lynn.

Internal search engines differ from public search engines like Google or Bing, in that an internal search engine only searches for content inside the company’s firewall.  Google cannot access internal content, therefore companies use search technology to make their content ‘findable.’ “Companies want to keep internal information safe and private.  But they still need to find it” explained Lynn.  “That’s why they need search technology integrated into their organization’s system.”

For more information on search engines, product search, web portals and search engine migration, visit TNR’s main website.  To receive a free copy of the white paper, click here.

TNR Global www.tnrglobal.com, is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions for publishing companies, news sites, web directories, academia, enterprise, and SaaS companies. TNR’s past clients include the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mass Art & Culture, InterNano, Innovara, and the Allegis Group. TNR Global is located at 245 Russell Street, Suite 10 in Hadley, Massachusetts. TNR Global serves clients throughout New England, nationally, and world-wide. Its offices are in Hadley and Greenfield, Massachusetts.