We are indeed a JVM shop. Doing something resembling consultancy is a fallback position for us. We don't want to reject big contracts, obviously, but in many ways the more technically challenging problem we'd like to solve is making an NLP product that's portable between different apps. We think we're getting there for certain sizes and classes of app, but we'll see where the market takes us when we have a saleable product.
Absolutely sell/license the portable component. Doesn't have to be a consultancy thing (although it might have to be in the beginning). Either as a library or as a standalone server like Solr. 99.99% of data in the world that this is relevant for (sales/revenue numbers, finance etc) is locked away and you are never, ever, going to get access to it on servers you control.
Yeah, this is the model that I had in mind. There's a giant enterprise (and government!) market for this sort of stuff who rarely venture out into places as cool as HN ;-) (They can be tricky to sell to though given the time involved and even finding them in the first place.)
1) they often have sprawling, disparate data sources, with schemas designed by deranged people in the 80s or 90s. The cleaner (and admittedly smaller) your data, the easier you can integrate, and to be honest, there's probably a hard limit at some point beyond which we couldn't provide value without doing bespoke customisation.
2) there are some fearsome competitors at the higher level of the market, who offer wider business intelligence suites.
