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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.