Microsoft announced today its intent to purchase FAST Search and Transfer for a deal worth approx 1.2 billion. This surprises me, yet it doesn't. FAST the engine behind severy major commerce sites such as Getty Images, Nordstrom, Infospace (local search), LexusNexus, and Microsoft's Marketplace.com.
But last year at the FASTForward 07 conference sponsored by FAST, you could see the content was highly Enterprise search focused and that the company seemed to be targeting that market stronger than ususal.
The surprising thing to me is that I don't understand with the piles of dollars Microsoft has spent on Microsoft Live development, why it still has to turn to an external vendor for search.
I've led the FAST effort at Getty for a couple years. Its a good product and is served in both windows and linux, but expensive to scale. We also converted from an initial deployment on windows to linux which has proved to be much more stable, and has better performance. I wonder what Microsoft will choose to do with FAST's native Linux platform.
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