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The Lucene/Solr open source search technology is recognised as providing like for like enterprise search functionality alongside the leading proprietary enterprise search vendors such as: Microsoft (FAST Search & Transfer), Autonomy, Google and Endeca. As an open source technology, it also delivers significant cost savings, with no upfront capital expenditure for the software, and does not lock you into a proprietary stack. However, the challenge for any commercial organisation that has a significant reliance on search has been around the necessity for supporting any technology investment. With a commercial support model you are guaranteed service level agreements, access to professional engineering and consulting resource, defined roadmaps, certified distributions, and so on. This challenge was solved in early 2009 when Lucid Imagination was formed.

Lucid Imagination is the commercial company dedicated to Apache Lucene technology. The company provides value-added software, documentation, commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting, and free certified distributions, for Lucene and Solr. Lucid Imagination's goal is to serve as a central resource for the entire Lucene community and marketplace, to make enterprise search application developers more productive. Customers include AT&T, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, Zappos, The Motley Fool, Macy's, Cisco and many other household names. Lucid Imagination is a privately held venture-funded company. The investors include Granite Ventures, Walden International, In-Q-Tel and Shasta Ventures.

With the Guardian News and Media being the first significant UK company to commence a relationship with Lucid Imagination, the company recognised the need to form a strong service base in the UK. As an established Platinum partner for Alfresco in the UK, with an existing infrastructure of design, architecture, build and support capability, highly experienced in getting the best out of open source technologies, without compromise on enterprise standards, we were the obvious choice of partner. It was a natural evolution for us – already providing commercial enterprise support for open source content management, it was a logical step to add commercial enterprise support for search. Therefore, in July 2010, we were appointed as UK authorised SI partner.