Microsoft Makes Offer for FAST

January 8, 2008 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Fast, Microsoft, enterprise software

The news today regarding FAST is big. Perhaps not as historic as the New Hampshire primary, but to the enterprise search teams at FAST and Microsoft, this is a new chapter in the evolution of the search software market.

For those who missed it, Microsoft has tendered an offer to acquire the shares of FAST. FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended to the shareholders to accept this offer, and shareholders representing approximately 35 percent of outstanding shares have already accepted, which makes this pretty much a done deal. We expect the acquisition to close in the second quarter, and the deal is valued at about $1.2 billion.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, sums up the rationale for the move this way: “Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes… Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”

Quite simply, Microsoft and FAST share the same vision of the importance of search to the enterprise. The companies also have complementary capabilities across the board. The fit has been evident for many to see. Microsoft has said that their reasons for acquiring FAST are threefold: leadership and vision, an extraordinary team of talented people, and best-in-class enterprise search technologies and innovations. We’re blushing with pride. And excited about our joint future.

This deal validates what we’ve been saying all along regarding the importance of search in the enterprise infrastructure. And, it allows FAST to take advantage of Microsoft’s reach. Our CEO, John Lervik, puts it succinctly: “This acquisition gives FAST an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and innovations to more and more organizations across the world.”

FAST has been tremendously successful on its own as a trailblazer in search, but the amplification that Microsoft will provide is truly synergistic. And I really don’t like using that word unless it’s apt.

So make sure to book your registration for this blog’s namesake, our industry conference FASTforward ’08 in Orlando! You’ll be watching the evolution of the industry in action. Now, more than ever, you can’t afford to miss it!

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Agenda announced

December 4, 2007 at 10:54 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08

Today, FAST announced the agenda for its widely anticipated FASTforward conference to be held on February 18, 2008 in Orlando. What makes this noteworthy is that this same gathering in 2007 proved to be one of the truly special events of the year, bringing an eclectic and original set of thinkers, visionaries, and practitioners together to talk about changes in business. The premise is simple: since search is changing the world, why not get everyone together under one big tent and talk about the business and technology impacts of search? The output was magical. But don’t just take our word for it - search the comments from Andrew McAfee, Paula Thornton, David Weinberger, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Ray Lane on what made this pow-wow Davosian.

In a series here on fastforwardblog, we will profile some of the key speakers due to talk this February.

We’ll start with Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and one of the best strategists around these days. Plus, Don’s a fellow Canadian.

I’ll start with a quote:

“With the publication of his earlier work on information technology, Don Tapscott established a reputation as one of the world’s leading ‘cyber-gurus.”
- Vice President Al Gore

The thing that makes Tapscott a perfect fit for FF08 is that this year’s theme is The User Revolution. We share the belief with many others that an emergent user movement is afoot, enabled by new technologies and new ways of working that are empowering people to change the way they consume information. The crux of the ‘how’ is a set of technologies around interaction management, underpinned by search which allow users to self-organize, contribute, comment, and collaborate at scale. Wikinomics is the business foundation which spells out the imperative; Tapscott is the perfect messenger.

As CEO of a think-tank New Paradigm, Don enjoys exceptional access to some remarkable people. Sure he has keynoted over 1000 conferences, executive planning sessions and other gatherings since New Paradigm was founded in 1993. But what’s really impressive is that he has presented to over half of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, and has shared the stage with Heads of State such as President Bill Clinton, CEOs such as Sam Palmisano (IBM), Steve Balmer (Microsoft) and A.G. Lafley (Procter & Gamble), as well as social leaders such as Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum) and Linus Torvalds (Linux).

I’m convinced he’s going to be a great speaker - well worth coming down on February 18th to see.

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But First a Word from Our Sponsor…

November 1, 2007 at 4:06 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Search, User Revolution

In a rare solipsistic interlude, allow me to spend this post talking about why FAST has been driving the fastforwardblog and this conversation about Enterprise 2.0 and the User Revolution. We firmly believe that it is our mandate as the leading search company to continue to beat the drum about the User Revolution and search’s central role therein. Companies that are building revenue streams that empower users are increasingly looking to search to help them achieve market power. Also, as our CEO recently pointed out, “more and more enterprises are realizing that search is a strategic tool and are adopting it as a vital part of their IT infrastructure.” We’re benefiting from these trends as is witnessed in our well-received Q3 results press release. This tailwind is giving FAST palpable momentum: it reported revenue in line with expectations, cash collections at a record high, and impressive growth in both deferred and recurring revenue. One analyst wrote “Fast is on the right track with it comes to strategy in our view with its business focus on monetization and high-end enterprise.” BASF, Bayer AG, Disney, EDS, KDDI, Petrobras, Pfizer are recent wins that join an impressive roster of global enterprises that see the value in enterprise search.

Why shine the spotlight on us? We’re evidence that there is strong market momentum towards user-empowering applications of Enterprise 2.0 and search technologies. Our customers and our results validate that we’re on to something. The value of this discussion forum and blog are numerous, not the least of which is that it acts as a lubricant for companies that are considering taking the next step. With a nod to Safa Rashtchy (a potential keynote speaker at next February’s fastforward), the User Revolution is in full-swing and FAST is helping propel it.

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The link between Personalization and Social Networking

August 20, 2007 at 3:56 pm · Filed under Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

In a great article regarding the future of merchandising, Joe Lichtman gives a view of the future of eCommerce. At the end of the rainbow, we’ll get microsites for everyone. Sounds familiar? It should: it’s the Amazon model. Lichtman explains that the reason the site is so compelling is because every single experience is built on top of understanding you. The social aspect of all of this includes features such as Listmania, you might also like, and people like you also bought. It is an essential part of the buying process and has become more-and-more expected on-line. So if you’re a retailer out there, can you afford not to offer personalized merchandising? Lichtman says no and introduces the terms searchandising and personalized merchandising to show how search makes it all happen:

Can You Be Like Amazon?

Two fifths of U.S. consumers now expect retailers to offer them personalized promotions, according to research from Gartner. Yet only 16 percent of retailers are using personalized recommendations tools, according to Forrester. Now is the time to get personal before your competition does.

Like Amazon, you should be focused on building a personalized online shopping experience that is based on personalized search, navigation and recommendations. What’s important, though, is that you look at personalized merchandising as a cohesive strategy. The personalization piece parts — your search engine, navigation engine and recommendations engine — must work together as one. Only then can you ensure true personalization and have a single point of management.

While a dynamic, personalized storefront will automate some aspects of the online merchandising process, the role of the online merchandiser will become even more critical. There will always be a need to overlay the right set of business rules to align personalization with the key needs of the retailer. The benefit of the personalized storefront is that it allows you to merchandise for future conditions instead of reacting to past trends and data.

The concept of a personalization and recommendation engine is critical not just to retailers but also to Enterprises whose knwoledge workers benefit from being able to serendipitously discover what others like that they might also like, what others have found that they may also find useful, what others have created that they might also be able to monetize. Paula in her post and JP in his fifth of a series allude to this very thread that what we like is more important than what we see.

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FAST

Sharepoint gets a boost

July 19, 2007 at 4:14 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 are usually tied back to a common source – improvements in the way users share and communicate information with each other. 2.0 suggests a new age, a User Age where consumers, either as individuals or as part of an enterprise, are taking control of content and information consumption, forcing business to respond to their new demands.

The businesses that are able to respond to these new trends with the right offers, content, community, branding, advertising, and search will be crowned the winners. This market power is accrued by businesses that let users harness information according to each of their individual consumption patterns.

When you look at one of the most ubiquitous platforms for facilitating information consumption, you need not look much further than SharePoint. And yet, to truly satisfy a SharePoint user, enterprises need to ensure that the information that they want is easily consumable. More often than not, information consumption and use is driven by search. Which is why the recent news regarding FAST extending the value of SharePoint is significant. Because if you believe we are in an era of consumption, then enterprises need something now to get them started, to get their consumers hooked on the concept of sharing and collaborating in an intuitive way.

Ushering in the User Age? That’s a bold claim. Rather, you might say they are helping it along.

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Does IT get in the way?

June 1, 2007 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Still scratching my chin regarding Chambers’ comments quoted here by Networkworld’s Phil Hochmuth. Regarding Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 tools and technologies, Chambers says that they have “been a way that people kind of communicated in spite of the IT department” inside large organizations.

“In spite of IT” is a powerful statement. Isn’t IT meant to serve its business users? Isn’t IT supposed to pick up on the real ways by which people communicate and share, how knowledge workers search for information? Isn’t IT supposed to be a partner in achieving business benefits? If IT isn’t doing this, and people are adopting any tools to run their business in spite of IT, then does IT matter?

Of course, it does. Since Chambers sells principally to this constituency, he needs to add, “Now the IT department has to lead.” As a vendor, of course, we want IT to succeed and if they can be at least a better partner, and provide the appropriate Enterprise 2.0 technologies (we’d say, built on search), they will matter.

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Fast Track: Enterprise 2.0

May 16, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Today is a big day in New York for those of us interested in swapping ideas and perspectives on Enterprise 2.0. Over from London is Euan Semple who made a name for himself at the BBC former head of Knowledge Management and Social Media and has since become one of the more eloquent thought-leaders for Enterprise 2.0, focusing on the organizational issues surrounding adoption. Also, Richard Corson from Marriott and Jim Livingston from University of Utah Health Care will talk about how they achieved measurable business results by building their Enterprise 2.0 strategies on search technology. Also, Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit will be presenting their latest original research findings on the prevalence of Web 2.0 within the enterprise. Yours truly will also be presenting this discussion on how search is powering Enterprise 2.0.

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Bursty Saves the Day!

May 11, 2007 at 9:39 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post

Echoing Tom Mandel’s recent post and with a nod as well to Anne Zelenka, I want to try to give a concrete example of how a traditional enterprise workflow (closing a deal) can be augmented with Enterprise 2.0 technologies, breaking down organizational boundaries and letting users uncover associations and gain new insights.

We go back to the world of Enormabus and meet Bursty:

Bursty employee finds a way to adapt outside tools into his work-life to give himself an edge, in the process reinventing how he works and leverages information.

Bursty works for Thogwheel and is trying to close a big deal at Enormabus. Bursty is browsing Facebook and finds out about Eargot, a potential influencer at Enormabus through a fellow MIT grad. Bursty then uses a social networking search service to identify two possible links or shared tags between himself and Eargot. He investigates one by email; no response. He investigates the other by IMing a friend who says he’s lost touch but offers a cryptic clue: Geneva. He searches for Geneva across all of Thogwheel’s CRM repositories and finds that Eargot (misspelled) is based in Geneva even though his office location is Toulouse. Inside his company, he uses employee search to find fellow employees in Geneva who might be able to secure a meeting with Eargot.

On another front, Bursty discovers through a search of his channel partner’s wikis that one of the critical decision criteria for the deal is making the Enormabuses fly longer with less maintenance.

Meanwhile, Bursty gets a personalized alert from his search portal telling him about a materials study that may help alleviate one of the deal’s sticky points. He posts the doc to the group wiki and flies to Geneva on his way to Toulouse. At the critical meeting with Eargot, he has the author of the materials report on the phone, his local contact whom Eargot plays tennis with, and a just-in-time proposal that shows the link between Thogwheel’s product and the life expectancy of Enormabus. Eargot walks away convinced, adds Bursty to his network, and writes an influential report to the decision-makers advocating Thogwheel.

While some dealmakers are already using these tools and infrastructure, many others are not. At the end of the day, the winning proposal will be what matters in driving behaviour at Thogwheel and beyond.

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The User Revolution

March 21, 2007 at 7:11 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post

While we’re often talking about the Enterprise on fastforwardblog.com, I thought it might be interesting to go back to where it all began, namely the Web. I’d like to shift our focus on the changes occurring in advertising and traditional media. A fantastic new report was published by Piper Jaffray on February 22nd called The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem. In this 425-page industry report, the author Safa Rashtchy says:

Advertisers need to adapt to the new consumer demands and match their services closely with consumer needs. The old advertising adage that advertising is about “convincing consumers to buy what they don’t know they need” has to change. Consumers largely know what they need, and they want messages that are targeted at those specific needs. They also want to associate the brand with their lifestyle, and in doing so, they will become evangelizers for that brand. Thus advertisers need to forge closer relationships with consumers - close enough to be part of the content they are consuming, not just a commercial interruption of the content. In the new regime, advertisers must not only follow customer cues, they must also join their networks as active participants with a genuine interest in promoting consumers’ interests.

We at FAST agree that a massive change is occurring in media where traditional advertising is going to be replaced by contextual advertising where brand owners actively engage in connecting consumers to the content they seek or allowing consumers to create lifestyle- (and brand-) relevant content. Rashtchy cautions the traditional media companies to transform themselves into W20 companies, lickety-split and then mentions search as a key driver:

Search itself has become the new portal model, as many users now rely on search to navigate the Web and find answers to their questions. Searching is no longer just used to find information or to buy a product; search is the way people navigate the Internet.

Searchenginewatch also comments on where Piper Jaffray thinks search is going. Get your hands on this report. It’s well worth the read.

The E20 Take

How does this apply to the Enterprise? If you think of Corporate Communications as “advertising” and culture as “lifestyle”, then the employee user needs to be connecting to the content or communities they seek and the employee needs to contribute back to the enterprise discussion. In other words, it’s a bottoms-up world emerging and how the company’s senior management manages and disseminates information is being upturned.

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User-generated content, metadata and search

February 27, 2007 at 9:58 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Last week I sat on an interesting panel at the Wharton Technology Conference in Philadelphia with Ralph Folz of Molecular, Dan Burkhart from eBay, and Damon Cronkey from Yahoo! CorpDev. The panel was titled Amateur Content but quickly evolved into a discussion on business models, metadata, and user experience. Damon made some great points with respect to the proliferation of technologies and the need for user simplicity, citing the Pipes property at Yahoo! and its simple design. He also asserted that on a mobile device, getting to the right result must be push as opposed to click navigation (which is what FAST has been saying for a while).

I was asked a question by our very capable moderator - Robin Murdoch at Accenture - regarding what UGC means to me. I tried to broaden the definition of what UGC constitutes, pushing the discussion beyond YouTube to consider metadata as another valuable type of UGC. The panel universally heralded metadata as the key and cited a number of examples of monetizing metadata including “people who bought x also bought y” as well as automatically collecting and displaying what products influencers, community-members, and other gardeners are buying/seeing/suggesting. Robin asked the panel if the concentration of links emanating from GYMA was forcing sites to scramble and rethink business models. I jumped in and refuted this trend, citing Sue Feldman’s recent work at IDC, which states that a large percentage of links to destination sites are not coming from GYMA but are indeed coming from “vertical” portal sites or elsewhere. I was impressed by Dan’s humility to acknowledge that eBay had been a “front door” site but was now looking at enhancing its presence on the periphery or at the destination sites, consistent with this trend. But the coolest moment might have been when Robin asked us what we thought of Viacom’s standing up to Google/YouTube and demanding cessation of distribution of its proprietary content. Looking perplexed, I asked the crowd, “I don’t understand why it just can’t be free?” Applause broke out in the back of the room as this was after all a conference where a large percentage of attendees were students.

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Web 2.0 for the Enterprise

January 2, 2007 at 5:17 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Sponsored Post

Chip Griffin did an excellent job of summarizing Web 2.0 in his angel investor blog. While McAfee and Schrage might have created their own definitions, I think that Griffin’s list of ten can be applied, with little transmogrification, to the Enterprise.

• Organizing the Unorganized. The value of metadata is increasing. As we gather more metadata about our enterprise data, we have the opportunity not just to mine it, but also to act upon it in ways that achieve better business results, including gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, avoiding duplication of existing analyses, and gaining new perspectives from combining external, rich media, structured, and unstructured data.
• Enhancing Who Enterprises Choose as Consumers - Narrowcasting. Forget the Long Tail’s effect on consumer choice. Think about narrowcasting and the newfound ability, through the Web, to create niche markets that are profitable by precisely selecting exactly which products and services to sell to which micro-audiences. This is a matching exercise, at its core.
• Empowering Individuals to Be the Creators of Enterprise Data. Now, almost everyone in the enterprise is able to contribute to a business decision. Blogs, wikis, and search give the employee the ability to find, create and share insights that can be applied to decisions across the organization. Expert location may be the next killer app in the high performance workplace.
• Facilitating Constant Communication. Employees are more connected now than ever. Instant messaging and mobile email have elongated the work day and allow the employee to stay in touch with the enterprise 24/7/365. The opportunity to more easily communicate with each other, and with customers, opens the door to new business processes and collaborative innovation that takes advantage of constant connectedness.
• Sharing with Friends. Personal networks exist within the Enterprise. They are a constant source of support, advocacy, advice, and political capital. They are also the number one source for answers. Sharing with friends is the most easily applied Web 2.0 theme, especially for the younger Web natives who don’t separate their online and offline, on-the-job and off-the clock lives. Enterprise cultures are about to change as your employee base is infiltrated with Gen Yers, who have grown up without any distinction between virtual and actual interaction.
• Enabling a Multimedia Revolution. Multimedia will change certain enterprise communication patterns and the very nature of what is considered enterprise data. Collecting voice data from traders on the trading floor to feed it into the bank’s CRM is just one example of how traditional unstructured media can now be harnessed to deliver keener insights. Extraction of context and meaning from voice in real-time may be the salvation for the telcos.
• Making it Easier to Find and Spend Online. Web 1.0 featured search engines like Google and portals like Yahoo. Now on the Web, vertical search enables searching for specific categories of information. Jobs, news, video, coupons, products, photos, and myriad other categories have their own search engines. This extends nicely to the Enterprise and to the networks of companies that sell to each other, creating a B2B search explosion.
• Democratizing Labor Markets: Outsourcing. This is the first Enterprise 2.0 trend to hit mainstream media in a massive way back in 2002. The Internet enabled the outsourcing of business processes and IT and customer service and so many other functions so effectively that it is no longer visible. And we are moving towards a new granularity of outsourcing; for example, 5 people project team outsourcing partial research to a team of 3 contractors for a short range pay for performance contract). This new p2p (project to project) outsourcing is inherently a search/matching problem.
• Breaking Down Geographic Barriers. Collapsing time and space to make the enterprise operate in a unified fashion isn’t easy, but this old Enterprise 2.0 theme has been at work for the past decade, creating a revolution in the virtual office. The benefits to the firm go beyond costs and hiring the best talent but also give the individual work processes the chance to benefit from expertise that is globally distributed.
• Engaging the Individuals in Conversation with the Powerful. Never has it been easier for average people to engage in conversation with the powerful. Associates at all levels have real access to a conversation with their senior management, empowered by Enterprise tools such as Blog comments, interactive chats, Innovation Jams, virtual town halls, and other forums. These conversations improve the senior management’s decision making by helping them better understand what matters and by getting great ideas. And it lessens the sense of frustration that many have had in the past about being disenfranchised and incapable of accessing their CEO.

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