We were thrilled to attend last week’s USGIF GEOINT Conference in Orlando, Florida. GEOINT 2024 was Lucenia’s first conference as a company, and we were still determining what to expect when going to the conference. Still, we arrived eager to see where the community needed from a search perspective in their mission. Among the attendees were industry experts, government officials, and thought leaders, and we connected with various people from different industries. We shared our knowledge and expertise in geospatial search and vector data storage with attendees, and we were excited to see the interest and enthusiasm from the community. Several things stood out to us during the conference, and we wanted to share some of our key takeaways with you.

Customers in need of Hybrid Cloud and On-Prem Search Software

The Lucenia booth drew many GEOINT attendees with search use cases that need to run in self-hosted environments. They were looking for a solution that could seamlessly integrate into their existing systems, such as AWS GovCloud, and be tailored to their needs in privately hosted clouds. We demonstrated how Lucenia, with its support for a self-hosted deployment and customization capabilities, could help them add search to their applications without reingesting and copying all their data. The attendees were excited to learn more about Lucenia and how it could enhance their business operations.

As some businesses increasingly shift their focus to running on public clouds, there is a growing demand for search software in hybrid and private clouds. This demand is particularly true for companies and governments with sensitive data they prefer to store in something other than the public cloud. Lucenia was excited to show our approach to self-hosted search and work with businesses to find the best solution for their requirements. We are confident that Lucenia can expedite information retrieval, enhance data security, and streamline system integration.

Hybrid cloud adoption is becoming increasingly popular among businesses as they seek to leverage the benefits of both public and private clouds. With a hybrid cloud, organizations can take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public cloud services while maintaining control over sensitive data and applications in their private cloud infrastructure. This approach allows businesses to optimize their IT resources, seamlessly integrate self-hosted systems with cloud services, and ensure compliance with data security and privacy regulations. By adopting a hybrid cloud strategy, businesses can achieve greater flexibility, agility, and resilience in their IT infrastructure, enabling them to meet the evolving demands of their customers and stay competitive in the digital era. Lucenia provides a search solution that allows you to evolve your data over time and efficiently run it where it best suits your needs.

Concern Over Rising Cloud Costs

Another common theme we heard from attendees was the increasing storage costs of relying on public cloud services to power their operations. Many attendees explained that they are becoming more conscious of the costs associated with their cloud usage and are actively seeking ways to optimize their spending. They want to ensure that they get the most value out of their cloud investments while controlling their expenses. A focus on cloud spending has led to a growing demand for tools and strategies enabling customers to monitor, analyze, and optimize their cloud costs effectively. At Lucenia, we look to solve this problem by addressing the overly redundant storage of search data and how clusters up and scale back down. A proper autoscaling solution rings true for GEOINT’s attendees.

The concern over cloud spend stems from several factors. First and foremost, cloud services bill based on usage, meaning customers pay for what they consume. This pay-as-you-go model offers flexibility and scalability but can result in unexpected costs if not managed properly. Additionally, cloud environments are highly dynamic, with resources being provisioned and de-provisioned on demand. This dynamic nature makes it challenging for customers to predict and control their cloud spend accurately. Moreover, the complexity of cloud pricing models, with various pricing tiers, discounts, and add-on services, further adds to the difficulty of managing cloud costs. As a result, customers are increasingly seeking ways to gain visibility into their cloud spend, identify cost-saving opportunities, and implement cost-optimization strategies to ensure that their cloud investments align with their budgetary goals—Lucenia serverless looks to solve this problem as a solution to scaling and not a consumption-based cost.

Storing Vector Data to support AI and high-dimensional search

We were unsurprised that many attendees were interested in storing vector data to support AI and high-dimensional search. Many businesses are looking for ways to store and search large amounts of vector data quickly and efficiently. We demonstrated how our dimensionality reduction could store large amounts of vector data rapidly and efficiently and how it could be customized to meet their needs.

Lucenia looks to leverage advancements in Apache Lucene to support high-dimensional workloads. One of the key features that enables this is the HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) algorithm. HNSW is a graph-based indexing structure that allows for efficient nearest neighbor search in high dimensional spaces. Using HNSW, Lucenia can quickly and efficiently store and search large amounts of vector data rapidly and efficiently. Lucenia enables businesses to swiftly perform complex AI and high-dimensional search tasks, opening up new possibilities for data analysis and machine learning applications. With Apache Lucene and HNSW, Lucenia can provide a powerful solution for businesses seeking to store and process high-dimensional data.

See you at the conference next year!

We had a fantastic time at the USGIF GEOINT Conference and look forward to the 2025 event. We are excited about the evolving needs of the community and how we can continue to assist businesses with their search software and AI data storage requirements.We have had several from the conference wanting to test out Lucenia as they are actively considering changes from existing vendor solutions. If you have any questions or want to explore how Lucenia can support you, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We value your interest and look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you for your time, and we hope to see you at the conference next year!

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