FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary, Opens New Chapter

April 25, 2008 at 11:10 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, Search, SharePoint, enterprise software

I’m happy to report that Microsoft has filed with the Oslo Stock Exchange announcing that it is closing its tender offer for FAST shares (see Zia’s post back in January about the initial offer). The filing states that it has acquired 97.37% of the shares of the company. This means that FAST is now part of Microsoft, with the new designation: FAST, A Microsoft® Subsidiary.

The net of this is that the FAST team moves intact into a much-expanded Microsoft Enterprise Search Group (MESG, for those collecting new acronyms). We are particularly excited about the charter for this new group, which is to invest to be the industry leader developing the most innovative technologies for the widest range of customers and greatly expanding what has traditionally been viewed as the “search space.”

This direction is one that long-time analysts of the search space (myself included) have pointed to as the most likely development as search becomes more and more central to all of our online activities. We are still just at the beginning of the changes we see coming, which we see accelerating on the foundation of three core elements of the Microsoft search vision:

Search will be everywhere.
Search will enable unique user experiences.
Search will change the way people do business.

I wanted to share with FASTforward Blog readers what Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft Sharepoint General Manager and the business executive behind the acquisition had to say today on Microsoft’s Enterprise Search blog. Kirk’s post:

FAST Tender Offer Complete!

Well, it has been a while since I last posted – but for good reason. Aside from our usual day-to-day efforts to deliver great enterprise search solutions for our customers, we’ve also been feverishly working on the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer that we originally announced on January 8. Today, I’m excited to share that the tender offer is complete!

As I mentioned in January, FAST has an incredibly talented team of folks who bring great customer focus and tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields. One of their true visionaries, John Markus Lervik, who has been FAST CEO, will transition to become Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. John’s leadership will have an immediate impact on the development across our comprehensive portfolio of enterprise search offerings – including Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express , search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP – and will result in the future delivery of a single enterprise search platform. I’m thrilled to welcome our new team members on board and am eager for them to get started!

By bringing together our two companies, customers will no longer have to compromise when evaluating the enterprise search solution that’s best for them. We can now meet all their needs no matter how basic or complex: Search Server Express available as a free download; SharePoint offers search integrated with other business productivity tools; and for those with highly sophisticated needs, FAST ESP provides best-in-class capabilities for the most demanding search applications in both internal and customer-facing scenarios. And, you can be assured that with our expanded team in place, we’ll be in an even better position to continue innovation across all three products, including FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX.

Speaking of Linux and UNIX, some people may be (mis)interpreting our continued support and investment in these platforms as a broader change for Microsoft – so here’s some color. We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.

Net, our approach doesn’t imply any kind of broader change for our company in its strategy (so conspiracy theorists can stand down ) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.

Getting to this point has been quite a journey, but the most exciting part about it for me is that we are only just getting started. Whether it’s ensuring customers continue to get great service from the people and support teams they know or building on the span of our product portfolio, I’m confident that the combination of Microsoft and FAST will serve customers’ needs more broadly and help make enterprise search become a truly ubiquitous tool that is central to how workers find and use information.

I look forward to sharing more with you as the journey continues.

Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager,
SharePoint Business Group

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FAST

Gartner Amplifies Views on Info Access 2012

April 13, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Search, Sponsored Post, advanced search, enterprise software

At just-concluded Gartner Symposium in Las Vegas, Whit Andrews, raconteur and Gartner’s increasingly influential lead analyst on search (aka Information Access) offered a forward look on the market that stated: “Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by 2012.” (See Chris Kanaracus’ write-up of Whit’s talk in PC World’s PCW Business Center.)

What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.

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FAST

Invitation to FAST Webcast – 4/29: 2.0 Models in B2B Content

April 10, 2008 at 2:56 pm · Filed under Search, semantic

FAST invites you to join a hosted conversation between Graeme McCracken, Chief Operating Officer at Reed Business Search, and Kate Worlock, Director, Market Intelligence Service, Outsell.

When: Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 2:00-3:00 pm EDT

Register Now by clicking here.

Learn how Reed Business, a member of the Reed Elsevier Group and largest B2B publisher in the world, is winning the premium content war by transforming their business from content creator to a leading vertical search provider. Graeme McCracken and Kate Worlock will discuss the approach Reed has taken to strategically leverage search and semantics across its portfolio of properties to provide a superior information discovery and consumption experience for its community and a flexible foundation for Reed Business.

Some Key Topics in the discussion:

• How publishers are bypassing Google and instead delivering their own state-of-the-art search models to showcase premium content, generate new revenue, and deliver precise and relevant content to build a loyal user base
• How positioning search as a platform, both push and pull, can help alleviate typical search pain points and drive traffic across sites to create a consistent and improved experience for users
• The role of search in unifying internal and external sources for a 360-degree view of information
• How search experiences can be segmented to meet the needs of different end user communities.

Register Now!

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It’s the metonymy, stupid!

March 5, 2008 at 12:18 pm · Filed under Commercials, David Weinberger, FASTforward08, Marketing, Search, Social Computing, Social Media, Story, TV, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, advanced search

The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

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FAST CEO John Markus Lervik

February 21, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast, Search

Jerry asks John how it feels to see his small Norwegian company grow into a global company — and what the Microsoft deal means.

Bio: John Markus Lervik, Ph.D., is CEO and a co-founder of FAST. Dr. Lervik earlier served as the company’s CTO, and holds a Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

 

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Zia Zaman, executive vice president, global marketing, FAST

February 20, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast, Search

Zia Zaman’s take-aways from FASTforward’08 and his views on how search will change the world.

 

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Quick Take: Benjamin Rudolph, Search Discovery

February 20, 2008 at 2:57 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Search

Benjamin, of Search Discovery, gives us his view on what the hot topics at FASTForward’08 are.

 

 Benjamin Rudolph: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (223)

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Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger

February 19, 2008 at 4:34 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, Interviews, Search

Rob on how search will help change radio and television and how one’s program guide will be enlarged.

Also see a related post from earlier in the day: Why is search so important and so valuable. From the post: “I will leave Fast 08 knowing one thing. That Search will be one of the key ingredients in the new business model.”

 

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Why is search so important and so valuable

February 19, 2008 at 3:42 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, Fast, Search

I will leave Fast 08 knowing one thing. That Search will be one of the key ingredients in the new business model.

Imagine if I sent you a container full of DVDs. Packed to the top with DVD’s. Many of them great films and shows but many of them not. Imagine there are 50 million of them in the container. Would this be helpful for you? In your busy day, how much time would you invest in trying to find the gems? With so many unknown to you, would you bother to have a look to see if you would like them?

My bet is that you would give up after a while. And so all that content would in effect have little value - even though it may have cost a lot to make.

Now now metaphor. Imagine the web in say 3 years time. Now for every conventional film, there are a million made by us the public - some of which are very good. There are more films in 2010 than have ever been made before. Now every film made will be there. (If film bores you, think books, or music, or shirts, or shoes) Think of a store the size of America - with no order to the layout or shelving) Will you have time to sort through all of this? I doubt it.

So of course when and should you find something that you like it will have value. In this new world of personal film, there will be thousands of films that you have never heard of that you might like. But the barriers to finding it are very high.

So I am now convinced that in a world of infinite information, finding what I like and what I would like will become one of the most valuable processes. Search becomes not a nice tool but essential. I even use it myself now to find my own stuff. I can’t possibly keep up even with my own output let alone yours!

True search will not look like Google search box. I will want to know stuff that is important for me as a matter of course. I want events and stuff that will affect me to arrive before my eyes. I will want to be able to find stuff I don’t even know I need.

My bet is that my friends will play a role in this. Even today, I would rather, in my time starved life, accept the recommendation of a friend than a stranger. He knows me and is filtering better.

For time and attention are scarce for all of us.

So as I struggle to understand all I have heard today - I know this. That the web has made the world infinitely more complex. There are too many choices out there for me to comprehend.

Evolved search will give me a perspective that will enable me to make meaning of it. Evolved Search will be like my own nervous system on the web. It will be an extension of me. It will filter as much as find.

Our nervous system deliberately limits noise. The world and life offer us too much data. So our eyesight is confined to a narrow bandwidth. Our hearing can be selective - enabling most of us to hear what others say in a crowd. We have evolved to select out the important from the noise. So it will be with Search - it too will have to constrain but also allow - allow what is most meaningful for each of us.

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Jorn Ellefsen - CEO of Comperio

February 19, 2008 at 1:19 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Search

A discussion of the international search business with with Jorn Ellefsen of Comperio, a FAST partner company that is enabling customers by making search specific worldwide.

 

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Recommendation & Search: New FAST White Paper

February 14, 2008 at 5:13 pm · Filed under Search, Sponsored Post

FAST recently released a white paper on the business and technology of recommendations that, yes, we are recommending to FASTforward Blog readers.

Focusing on the business challenges facing managers of media and entertainment websites, the paper, Enhancing Content Discovery Through Recommendations Solutions, includes insights on how innovators can:

• Grow content and advertising revenues by exposing new or unknown content. Current search structures guide users to content within a particular topic area or category. By building associations across categories, recommendations expose users to what they may have otherwise bypassed
• Encourage browsing by teasing users with additional content choices, and spotlight popular content to drive wider distribution
• Obtain customer intelligence on which content items are most valued. Feedback loops analyze what content is preferred and not preferred in near real time by blending active feedback and customer behavior statistics
• Connect users with communities and experts who share their interests. The social context provides a rich source of insight on connecting people both with content and other people who share their interests or questions.

Register here to download this free paper from FAST today — and let us know who you would like to recommend it to!

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FAST

The Offer: Part 1, FAST Responds

January 10, 2008 at 8:32 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08, Microsoft, Search, SharePoint

While Zia offered a formal blog statement on Tuesday (re: the Microsoft offer), he did one better by talking to the blogging team directly, by phone today.

To facilitate timeliness I’m covering this in 2 parts: Part 1 is a general recap of the meeting; Part 2 covers the industry response.

From a financial perspective the Microsoft offer put a 42% premium on FAST’s stock price, but is equal to the fully diluted equity value of the company. The offer needs 90% stockholder approval, but already has board approval and support from key stockholders. As with most deals such as this, trading of the stock was suspended during negotiation. As trade resumed, Microsoft displayed their confidence by buying 10.1% of FAST’s stock base.

In a letter to customers, FAST expressed their excitement and commitment to the offer: “The acquisition not only validates FAST’s vision and long-held leadership in the search marketplace, but it also opens a new chapter in the ongoing evolution of search. We are now moving toward enabling customers to fuse cutting-edge search technologies with leading business productivity capabilities”

The Microsoft Strategy
The primary focus of the acquisition is toward bolstering SharePoint’s search capability. While the FAST team will be aligned to SharePoint development, the company will exist as a wholly-owned subsidiary. FAST will continue to service its existing markets, including sales to LINIX shops.

If you’d been paying attention (apparently I wasn’t), you’d have noted that Microsoft and FAST had already been working to bring the two technologies together. Back in July 2007 Microsoft released federated search connectors to FAST ESP.

When SharePoint is competing for corporate sales, a primary decision disqualifyer is search. The addition of the enterprise-class performance of FAST ESP gives Microsoft greater leverage in major deals for which search is an important criterion. Many are saying this fills a big hole in the SharePoint offering. This acquisition will also decrease the complexity of dealing with two different companies to obtain key enterprise workplace functions.

Technology aside, this deal will immediately increase Microsoft’s European presence. Microsoft will acquire a major research footprint in Europe and takes an increased posture as a pro-European company.

The Future
This deal reinforces FAST’s ongoing commitment to innovate the enterprise workspace. While search is part of Enterprise 2.0 it is not all of it. This deal is a critical step to put the user in control and positions Microsoft to better compete in a user-reactive market. This radically changes the search marketplace and puts the working-class in a better position to participate in the benefits of 2.0. It definitely increases the potential to ‘shorten the distance’ between the individual and critical information.

There is a lot to be decided over the next several weeks and months — no roadmap for product development has been decided. With FASTforward ’08 just a few weeks away, the conference will swell with conversations around the latest news, as it progresses (and an increased Microsoft presence will be evident). Zia reiterated a commitment to the unique experience I was appreciative of last year: the FASTforward event in Orlando will be the place to engage in deep discussions between Customer/Partner/ISV/analyst. It will be THE event to participate in truly industry-significant discourse around the future of the enterprise workspace.

Come be a part of it (or you’ll have to just read about it).

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Microsoft bidding to buy Fast - What this may mean for all of us

January 8, 2008 at 9:47 am · Filed under David Weinberger, Fast, Microsoft, Search, Social Media, TV, Video, Wisdom of Crowds

Why is Microsoft buying Fast and why should we care?

David Weinberger will be speaking at the Fast Forward conference in Feb. I mention this in the context of his helpful thoughts about how the world is going to be “organized” when there is so much content available.

The world no longer has to be organized in a hierarchy.  It can be found instead.

It appears that Micorsoft sees the value in enabling people within enterprises to discover the “Wisdom of Crowds”. No longer does the Enterprise have to Organize its information in an ever more cumbersome and complex hierarchy. What Microsoft hope they can offer the user is easy access to anyhting inside the organization - just as Google is allowing us such access outside. With this approach to search, the full power of the enterprise knowledge can be accessed relatively easily. This might actually start to change things?

This leads me to another point about Media, TV and Radio.

TV and radio Content is today largely organized as a library or worse. Much of the content is simply a set of lists or even worse a set of Banker’s Boxes with stuff in it that you have to rummage through to find. Look around station or Producers sites - I wont embarrasss them by linking. You will see a catalog or worse a long, long list of stuff with no way of finding it or finding out whether the content is worth looking at.
My sister lost a 4 carat diamond a few years ago while cleaning out the horses in her barn. The diamond remains latently valuable but only if a person was to find it. That is what it is like for most stations and producers. If you have diamonds, they are in the shit somewhere and no one knows how big they are. PS her old farm is in new Jersey.

So many in TV and Radio have not got one of the key value issues in the new media. If I cannot find it easily and if I cannot evaluate whether I should use my precious time, no matter how good the content is - it has little or no value.

Organizing content to be found and to be evaluated will be a critical source of value in the new media when content will approach the infinite.

More later