2011 was a good year for Sematext. Here are some highlights.
Products
In 2011, we’ve released several new versions of our popular AutoComplete, Key Phrase Extractor, and DYM ReSearcher products and have witnessed a number of organizations adopting them.
SaaS
After months of hard work, we’ve opened up our Search Analytics and Performance Monitoring services to public. Anyone can sign up for an account and use either or both of these services for free. Yes, both services are completely free now and can be used without any restrictions.
Services – Tech Support
In addition to our standard consulting services we’ve successfully started offering commercial tech support for Lucene and Solr. These annual subscriptions come in several different packages and are made for those running Lucene or Solr in production and wanting immediate access to Lucene and Solr experts when things go awry.
Services – Consulting Packages
For those who need long-term access to Lucene or Solr experts we started offering several levels of consulting support packages. What makes these packages attractive is that one gets immediate help to Lucene or Solr expert consultants while paying a lower rate in exchange for an annual commitment.
Conferences
We attended and presented at a number of conferences (slides and videos) in 2011 – Lucene Revolution in San Francisco in May, Berlin Buzzwords in June, Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona in October, and Enterprise Search Summit Fall in Washington, DC in November.
Open Source
During our work on Search Analytics and Performance Monitoring and specifically the parts of them that use HBase, we’ve forked a couple of open-source projects that we put up on Github. We are looking at open-sourcing a few other things in 2012. We’ve also contributed patches to Flume, Solr, HBase, and while in Berlin in June we took part in our first HBase Hackathon.
Team Growth
Our team has roughly doubled in size. Our people are now in 3 different time zones and 6 countries and we are looking to expand this further. We are actively hiring and have a number of open positions, from mobile development and design to system administration, sales and marketing. Of course, we are always looking for search and big data experts. The team didn’t grow only in number, but also in knowledge and expertise – we now have 2 Cloudera Certified Hadoop developers on staff, 2 published book authors, a recent Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Stanford online class “graduate”, etc.
Collaboration with Academia
We have partnered with a university lab on the other side of the Atlantic and have been collaborating on some interesting projects results of which we’ll share in 2012.
Overall, 2011 was a good year. But we are in 2012 now and it’s time to look ahead. Looking at our crystal ball, I see more fun work and more opportunities. We’ll do our best to make the most of them.