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This comes at a time when the giant Microsoft is fending off the growing Google,
the acquisition will greatly enhance their current search engine.
"Microsoft has large ambitions for big enterprise accounts that have
been traditionally the exclusive club of Unix and mainframe vendors," Charles
King, analyst with Pund-IT, told InternetNews.com. "Given the importance of
search in the emerging class of business applications, gaining world class
search technology is really important to them."
IDC analyst Sue Feldman
said search can be "endlessly useful" in the enterprise, just as database
applications have proven to be. "You're adding a kind of fuzzy matching to the
enterprise software stack that databases can't do," said Feldman, noting that
FAST offers more than simple look up.
"FAST has quite a tool box of
capabilities including geo-location and rich media support." She said companies
like FAST and competitors such as Autonomy and Exalead are addressing the need
of enterprise customers to access transactional, sales, Web and documents in a
unified way. "And with SOX (define) driving fear and dread, customers are
looking for easier ways to find specific information regardless of format," said
Feldman.
King notes that all the major enterprise players, including
IBM, SAP, Oracle, are bringing greater search capabilities into their core
enterprise products and Microsoft could hardly afford to be left behind.
Microsoft's Sharepoint has been a bright spot, particular for SMBs (define) but
isn't considered as scalable as other enterprise solutions.
"If you look
at the enterprise content management space, there's EMC with Documentum, another
is IBM's Information on Demand initiative," said King. "With these and others,
there's an underlying sense that information constitutes a discreet and very
important business asset that organizations need to take every advantage of. As
companies amass terabytes of data, finding access to billions of documents and
transactions becomes increasingly critical."
Tom Wilde, CEO of search
company EveryZing, is a former vice president of marketing for FAST, which he
left in 2001. Wilde thinks the FAST acquisition fits with Microsoft's ambition
to establish a kind of operating system for the enterprise, much as its OS rules
the desktop world. On the consumer side, Wilde thinks Google has already
established itself as the Internet's operating system.
"Search is like
the weather, it's that pervasive," Wilde told InternetNews.com. "What you're
seeing with Microsoft's purchase of FAST is a recognition that it needs an
industrial strength search platform for SharePoint to make it a one stop shop
for enterprise customers. Search is the best approach to aggregate both
structured and unstructured content for discovery."
You won't get any
argument on the latter point from Google. "This acquisition reinforces the fact
that search is important not only for consumers, but it is also the oxygen of
today's business," said a Google spokesperson in an e-mail sent to
InternetNews.com.
"We introduced the Google Search Appliance five years
ago to offer businesses a solution that is both as powerful and as easy to use
as search on Google.com. The consistent demand of businesses for enterprise
search solutions continues to validate our efforts," said the spokesperson.
FAST's larger competitor, Autonomy, put a positive spin on the Microsoft
deal. In a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com, Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch
claimed the deal "… effectively removes the FAST product set from competing in
94 percent of the enterprise search market where the customer needs to run some
part of search on non-Microsoft operating systems as most high end customers run
more than Microsoft such as UNIX or Linux."
However, with the FAST deal
still pending approval, Microsoft's support plans haven't been firmly
established. Recent deals show Microsoft is not averse to supporting Linux.
Lynch also asserted the deal will help Autonomy's licensing business among firms
that don't want to deal with Microsoft.
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