Earlier this week we sat down for an interview with John Markus Lervik, the co-founder and CEO of FAST. It’s the first in a series we’ll be conducting with industry players and observers in the weeks leading up FASTforward 07. We’ll be posting parts of the interview over the coming days. Here, in the first installment, John discusses the changing dynamics of the media business, Web 2.0 and its learnings for the enterprise, and the role of search.

HJ: The content industry is in the midst of massive transition and disruption thanks to the Internet and technology. Consumers are increasingly empowered, media companies’ products are being unbundled, the economics of legacy models are being challenged, etc. Can you talk about how these forces are impacting the media and information industries and how they make money?

JML: I could talk about it for days. It’s actually a big part of our business these days – about 60% of our business. From a very high level perspective we see a massive change in how people are consuming information and media – from print to online to mobile TV. And of course as part of that, we also see that the advertisers are moving with the consumers, as they have always done.

The interesting thing is that on top of this there are new and emerging business models – search-based or contextual-advertising based models that are proving to be both much easier to measure but also very lucrative. And this has largely been led by Google and Yahoo so far but there are also a lot of other companies coming in to the space.

Of course the other big change, another big paradigm shift is that consumers’ experience expectations are changing. People expect to be in the driver’s seat. In contrast to TV or broadcast and newspapers where one is at the mercy of the producers and editors who dictate what the show or publication is and what will be included, you can now get information in a much more contextual and personalized way – more one to one communications. And this is being driven or at least enabled by technology. And first and foremost among those technologies is search. But not just search through the query box – search is doing much more than just searching Web pages. It’s really the fundamental mechanism for aggregating content and data and then analyzing and organizing the content in meaningful ways, in contextual ways. In often cases also associated with advertising obviously.

So that’s one part of the picture. And this is affecting all media companies – be they newspaper companies, or a yellow pages publisher, or more conventional media companies. But it’s also starting to affect telecom and cable companies and mobile carriers. They see their value in the future is increasingly going to be as a bitpipe, enabling applications on top of their bitpipe and in that way they’re also moving towards being media companies themselves in that their revenues will come from providing advertisements and services associated with those consumer experiences and applications.

I think those are the two big trends and they’re happening all over the world in different ways. In Asia they’re way ahead with some of these mobile apps. In the U.S. you have the wide adoption of broadband service which has powered the explosion of online video sites. And in Europe the newspapers have a lot of interesting experiments and projects – they’re doing some very interesting things around local search and classifieds and vertical, localized search experiences.

HJ: You also have the Web 2.0 explosion and the rise of social media and related applications in the consumer space that are part of this new media revolution. What lessons and learnings are there for these models for the enterprise. Are these features and aspects applicable and if not why?

JML: As we talk about this let’s forget about even Web 2.0. Even before that you had the user and consumer getting in the driver seat. And that user wants access to everything that’s applicable to him or her and in many cases that also means engaging other users in their content experience whether it be through blogs or review sites or Wikipedia.

But even as these capabalities have arisen, I would argue that we’re still in the very early stages of the Web 2.0 world. You have a few early successes like YouTube and MySpace but it’s still very early. They’ve done some brilliant things but they’re still very niche – videos or blogs or personal websites. It’s still far away from where it’ll be in a few years.

On the other hand we see that some of these concepts and applications are also leading workers within companies to want to have a similar experience and community. And, as noted before, people are used to getting what they want and how they want it. So they’re looking for apps for sharing information, knowledge and document management and collaboration tools that share the same sensibilities as those they’re seeing in the consumer space. As well, people and companies now have a better understanding of the fundamental problems and challenges of these tools.
So, as those consumers think about getting those sorts of tools and capabilities in their companies, they’re thinking about how those tools can tap into the resources of their companies. In the past this would not have been possible – this piece is in one type of database, this other piece is in some other format or sort of storage structure. But that’s not true on the Internet. We now have the technology to be able to make sense of this data and find ways to analyze and connect it. It’s a paradigm shift in the way companies can think about all their content.

So we’re starting to see a number of innovative companies in which they’re starting to use wikis and relatively simple tools like that to enable employees to share informatino in the workspace and it can be much more viral, much faster to get such initiatives going rather than having much more stringent, top down collaboration tools. But again it’s relatively new but the good thing is that companies are beginning to realize that for these to be effective you need good information access mechanisms. That’s where we search coming in, not just as a feature or some sort of vertical solution but as an infrastructure layer to enable employees to find information across the company even if that data sits in different kinds of informations stores and formats.

Stay tuned for future installments in which John discusses how search is “going beyond the query box” to connect data and people within companies, the potential of search as a horizontal app, and discussion of FAST’s growth, network of collaborators, and innovation practices.