Search specialists Flax, based in Cambridge U.K., today announced they have been selected as authorized partner by Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Lucene and Solr.

Apache Lucene and Solr, available as open source software from the Apache Software Foundation, are powerful, scalable, reliable and fully-featured search technologies. Solr is the Lucene Search Server, making it easy to build search applications for the enterprise.

Charlie Hull, who leads the Flax team, said today “Solr is a powerful, scalable search engine already in use at some of the world's leading companies, including The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, and Cisco. Our long experience in implementing search solutions using open source technology made this partnership a natural fit. We're very excited about the partnership and how it will further enable us to supply and support cutting-edge search solutions.” Companies such as the Newspaper Licensing Agency, Mydeco and the University of Cambridge have already benefited from the expertise of the Flax team.

“The Lucene/Solr ecosystem is growing at an accelerated rate, with more and more organisations enjoying the economic benefits and flexibility of the open source model.” said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination. "The Flax team, with their decades of experience implementing search solutions, are perfectly placed to help customers create a search strategy for competitive advantage."

Flax will offer installation, integration and commercial support packages for Lucene and Solr, backed by Lucid Imagination. Charlie Hull from Flax will be on the closing panel at the Lucene Revolution conference in Boston, USA on October 8th and will also be presenting a talk at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event in London on October 21st.