Exciting Times Ahead

About 7 years ago, I met with Shay in a small coffee place in Tel Aviv. We talked about Compass and search in general. I only wished I had recorded that conversation. We talked about the future of information retrieval, about big data (although we didn't use this label yet) and the role that search technology, specifically open source search technology, will have in the future.

Fast forward a few years and there I was, with years of Lucene and Solr experience behind me, about to set up a company around open source search. I sat down with Steven and together we laid out the blueprints for the next generation search engine. We had a pretty good idea on the direction the information and data management world is heading. And we also knew what it was missing - A simple yet powerful distributed search engine, built to scale from ground up. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it :).

Few months later, Shay released the first version of Elasticsearch. And as time passed, it became clearer to us all that our visions are too much aligned to be ignored. It took some time and effort, but we finally made it happen - today the Elasticsearch company was born.

It is the beginning of a new era. And not in the traditional definition of search, but in the modern definition of information retrieval. The definition by which data becomes accessible in the form of insightful knowledge, or simply put:

Making Sense of Your (Big) Data

Shay did an amazing job with Elasticsearch. It's simply mind blowing to realize that he, single handedly, managed to build, support, consult and promote such as amazing piece of software and get it to where it is today. But even kimchyman has his limits. The community is immense. The install base is growing by the day (just the other day Elasticsearch reached the 1 million downloads mark on GitHub). The mailing lists and IRC channels are busier than ever. Companies are running their most critical runtime systems on top of Elasticsearch and demand continuous support. Elasticsearch, the company, no longer the missing piece in the success story of this product. It is here to support the continuation and development of the project, provide the much needed security for the ever growing install-base, and help expand the community through training and education.

There's a long journey ahead of us, but an exciting one. And we invite you to join us in this journey and share the excitement.