Dan's Take

Data and the DevOps Challenge

Lucidworks integrates new data sources into Fusion.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 05/03/2016

Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes dropped by to give me an update on what the company is doing, as well as discuss what the company is seeing in the market now. It appears that quite a bit has happened since our last conversation (see this article for details.)

New Insights From New Data Sources
Since the introduction of Lucidworks Fusion, the company has continued to integrate new data sources into the product and make it easier for analysts, developers and even executives to search the enterprise's data assets using a Google-like searching function and gather new insights. Fusion can now find data stored in a multitude of places, including:

• Server filesystems, such as BOX.COM, Dropbox, FTP, GoogleDrive, and Windows Share
• Various databases, such as Couchbase, and databases accessible via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), including Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Hadoop
• Apache Solr
• Apache Spark
• Logstash
• A host of respositories, such as Alfresco, Azure Blob, Azure Table, Drupal, GitHub, JIRA, Salesforce, Microsoft SharePoint, ServiceNow, Subversion, and Zendesk
• Social media sites, such as Jive, Slack, and Twitter
• Web sites
• Websphere

Lucidworks offers a number of tools for creating easy-to-use dashboards, allowing analysts and executives to search through available data to find relationships, new insights and even customer behavior.

Dan's Take: Bridging the Gap
During the discussion, I couldn't help but think about my recent article, "The Changing World of DevOps," in which I discussed the divergent goals and approaches used by enterprise IT organizations and the "challenger" departments using rapid development and delivery.

Enterprise IT focuses on slow, steady and reliable processes to provide highly reliable and available software. DevOps instead focuses on stepwise development processes and near-immediate deployment of software. This group does its best to quickly develop workable solutions for business needs and deploy them as the functions are completed. If something turns out to have a problem, DevOps will fix it and release an update. Some major enterprises are releasing updates several times per day.

I wonder if having a quick and easy way for sales, service, administration, manufacturing and other organizations to quickly search a large number of data sources and glean immediate results could bring these two warring factions together. Enterprise IT would be happy that these searches wouldn't allow everyone to make changes to data sources willy-nilly, nor would it require custom development, documentation and extensive training. The DevOps folks would be happy because solutions could be presented to stakeholders almost as quickly as they come up with questions to ask.

I'm hoping to speak with one of Lucidworks' customers to learn what they're doing and how quick access to all of the organization's data help them address day-to-day problems in sales, customer service and strategic planning.