Fast Search & Transfer
 |
|
| Industry | Information Technology |
|---|---|
| Fate | Acquired by Microsoft |
| Founded | July 16, 1997 |
| Headquarters | Oslo, Norway |
|
Area served
|
Global |
|
Key people
|
John M. Lervik (Former CEO), Bjørn Olstad (CTO) |
| Products | Search engines, enterprise search, information access, knowledge management |
|
Number of employees
|
750 |
| Parent | Microsoft |
| Website | www.fastsearch.com |
Microsoft Development Center Norway (before 2010 known as Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST)) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It had offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.
On April 24, 2008, Microsoft acquired FAST. FAST is now known as Microsoft Development Center Norway.
FAST offered an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provided a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offered a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company was developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine.
FAST delivers real-time search and business intelligence solutions, and currently has about 3,600 implementations. They offer a core search platform, FAST ESP, and develop solutions on top of the platform. FAST’s solutions are used in three areas; external (online and mobile), internal (information access and discovery) and OEM (embedded in other vendor’s solutions).
Some examples of their applications are:
FAST uses complementary technologies from BBN Technologies for speech recognition and Stellent (now part of Oracle) for the conversion of different file formats.
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