Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : Microsoft Announces Offer to Acquire Fast Search & Transfer

A summary from Microsoft GM Kirk Koenigsbauer

Let me first tell you a little about FAST.  They are headquartered in Oslo and have operations worldwide. Their people are fantastic and not only have a great customer focus, but also bring tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields.  Customers like Best Buy and CareerBuilder.com have deployed FAST’s solution, driving business results through advanced capabilities that can detect the context and intent of a query, perform complex query refinements, and enable dynamic query-driven navigation—all securely and at incredible scale.

So why are we doing this?  Ultimately, the combination of Microsoft and FAST eliminates the need for customers to compromise.  In enterprise search to date, organizations have basically been forced to choose between high-end, specialized products and more mainstream, infrastructure solutions-- but not anymore.  The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice—a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of enterprise search needs. 

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : Microsoft Announces Offer to Acquire Fast Search & Transfer