Guy Creese of Burton Group shares his view on how the FAST acquisition will compliment Microsoft Enterprise Search portfolio :
…. Microsoft announced today that it was buying Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian enterprise search firm, for approximately $1.2 billion. It looks like pretty much a done deal, in that FAST’s Board of Directors is recommending the acquisition and the two largest shareholders are on board (per a ZDNet blog post)….
… Strategically, Microsoft now has all the bases covered (and, as a nice side benefit, prevented IBM and Oracle from adding FAST to their arsenal). Now, of course, it has to execute, which is always easier said than done.
If you go down the list of competitors, they’re now coming up short:
- Autonomy: Starting to look a bit stranded as the remaining, large, best-of-breed vendor, and strong only in tier three. Great for publishers and specialized niche search, but too expensive for general deployment.
- Oracle: Has a solid tier two offering with Secure Enterprise Search, but nothing for tiers one and three.
- IBM: A lot of strong technology, but oriented more for integrators (think IBM Global Services) than for an off-the-shelf purchase. It doesn’t help that there are internal organizational walls to overcome. Search falls within the Information Management division at IBM, while collaboration is controlled by the IBM Lotus division.
- Google: A strong offering for tier one (Google Search Appliance), but nothing for tiers two and three.
To sum up, Microsoft just became a one-stop shop vendor for enterprise search. …
Source: Microsoft Buys FAST; Last Year It Was BI, This Year It’s Search
Date Published: Tue, 08 Jan 2008
