Enterprise Search Provider Acquired

To compete in the high end of the enterprise search market, Microsoft has offered to acquire Norway-based Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) for approximately US$1.2 billion. If approved, the acquisition will give Microsoft a more scalable and customizable enterprise search solution than SharePoint Server is today, letting the company serve customers that create and archive billions of documents. The acquisition will bring Microsoft into direct competition with IBM’s Omnifind and search specialists Autonomy and Endeca and removes a possible acquisition target for Google, which might seek to expand into the high-end of the enterprise search market.

Going Upmarket

Enterprise search tools help organizations (including small and midsize businesses, not just enterprises) find information in a wide variety of data sources, including file systems, e-mail systems, and corporate business applications.

So far, Microsoft’s enterprise search strategy, which is centered on SharePoint Server, has focused on affordability and easy installation and integration with existing systems. While relatively inexpensive, with most installations topping out at less than US$100,000, SharePoint has limitations in terms of index size (around 50 million files), query throughput (tens of queries per second), data classification, and supported data types (no audio or video, for instance). In this market, Microsoft’s most important competitor is Google’s line of search appliances.