Lucidworks, a leader in enterprise search solutions, today announced Fusion 3, its updated application development platform. With the Fusion 3 release, organizations get greater operational simplicity, an accessible user interface, and query simulation capabilities, accelerating a search application’s time-to-value to quickly deploy powerful search apps that index all your data and give end users a compelling, productive experience.
Fusion 3 provides out-of-the-box capabilities for teams seeking to build robust enterprise-level search applications. With greater operational simplicity, IT personnel can now leapfrog months ahead in the development cycle, which allows them to focus on customizing applications to meet unique business needs. Shortening the development cycle even more, a streamlined guided setup feature makes Fusion 3 accessible to non-technical teams who can quickly build search applications that meet high user expectations.
Fusion is at the core of our business as an enterprise solutions provider,” explains Lucidworks CEO, Will Hayes. “CTOs face demanding expectations to deliver a Google-like experience to users and an Amazon-like experience to customers but often IT isn’t as search-savvy as they need to be. This, coupled with the deluge of data across departments, makes it difficult to share and communicate findings. Fusion 3 helps companies reap the benefits of big data and quickly build applications that accurately retrieve information without draining limited IT resources.”
Current Fusion users can expect new features like the Query Workbench and preview of data transformation processes. With the latest updates, teams are now able to run simulations with sample data sets — or input proprietary data — to experiment with different data sources and see hypothetical results. The Query Workbench lets teams adjust relevancy of signals and input different parameters to find the optimal setting before building more permanent applications. Lucidworks also enhanced Fusion’s connectors to integrate data using more powerful parsers for higher relevancy.
Initially, we built our search with Apache Solr because of its reliability and open source,” said Andy House, IT Director at Menards, who implemented Fusion for the home improvement retailer’s e-commerce search. “Fusion gave us the power to create a more sophisticated, relevant search experience for every customer in half the time than if we had done it with just Solr. With Fusion, we can quickly run A/B tests in real-time and see the effects instantly. We’ve seen our conversions increase more than we had initially hoped for.”
Fusion 3’s key features include:
- Streamlined Setup – Getting a search app up and running shouldn’t take weeks. With Fusion 3’s new streamlined setup, a developer can go from data set to working search-ready app in a matter of minutes. This guided configuration also includes faceting, field mapping, and other transformations.
- Index Workbench – Fusion 3’s Index Workbench lets teams easily manage and organize ETL (extract/load/transform) processes. The new preview feature shows how different configurations will affect your collections before they’re indexed.
- Query Workbench – Simple adjustments to relevancy scoring shouldn’t require engineers to get involved. Fusion 3’s Query Workbench enables point and click relevancy configuration to boost specific results or even specific conditions. It also allows users to tune results for increased relevance and test changes before they go to production.
- Object Import/Export – Fusion 3 introduces the ability to export, import, and share the heart of a Fusion app or configuration. Collection configurations, pipeline setups, schedule listings, aggregation settings, dashboard layouts, and other objects can all be easily shared, and users will be able to replicate configurations from development to QA to staging to production.
- Graphical Admin UI – To simplify all parts of development and deployment, a graphical admin enables a UI framework for rapid prototyping of an organization’s search app.
- SQL Everywhere – A common hurdle with new search apps and platforms is having to learn a whole new set of commands and operators to get to your data. Fusion 3 includes full SQL compatibility. Users can query an index with familiar SQL commands already known. There are endpoints so users can hook into other favorite services, integrations, and applications as well.
Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.
Speak Your Mind