Overview: FAST Search
Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) became a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft in January 2008 in a $200MUS deal that brought the skills of one of the best search research and development teams in the world. With the acquisition, FAST combined with Microsoft leapfrogged industry leader Autonomy, which had taken the lead when it acquired Verity in 2005.
We call FAST the "bring it on" guys because their technology is feature rich, powerful and flexible if somewhat complex, and the technology highly scalable: we've never seen FAST shy away from benchmarks with huge numbers of documents and extremely high search activity in terms of 'queries per second'.
Products
The flagship of the FAST product line is called ESP for Enterprise Search Platform. The ESP architecture is designed to be modular and flexible, which is one of the reasons FAST has been able to provide so many innovative features without significant changes to the underlying architecture. For example, FAST exposes an indexing pipeline that lets developers easily customize the indexing process to add specialized capability - a capability few products expose and support with such simplicity.
FAST recently announced their plans for integrating ESP into the Microsoft SharePoint universe. The initial phase is a special promotion of ESP for SharePoint available starting in February 2009; and a longer term integration tentatively called FAST Search for SharePoint to be available by early 2010. At the same time, FAST has announced plans for a high end ESP for Internet for companies that need the powerful capabilities such as faceted navigation, product and content promotion, and extreme scalability in terms of content size and search activity.
Features
FAST has been among the leaders in innovating features and capabilities. Some of these include:
- Integrated and straightforward Faceted Navigation
- Unsupervised and supervised entity extraction
- Index and query pipelines
- Predictable scalability
If you have questions about any of these FAST capabilities, email Dr Search or give us a call at +1-408-446-3460 and we can talk about how these and other capabilities might work in your environment.
Pricing
Enterprise search pricing is often difficult to determine both because companies don;t seem to publicize their pricing and because most high-end environments require extensive analysis to scope a solution. Nonetheless, FAST has announced the pricing for its ESP for SharePoint product at $25K per server (plus service and maintenance) with a minimum of three (3) servers. Typically these server licenses will be used for servers in development, staging, and production environments; or for load balancing and indexing. And customers must have SharePoint and eCal licenses, so it's not easy to determine the total cost without a consultation. We can help: contact us today at info@ideaeng.com or at +1-408-446-3460.
Summary
Now that FAST is a subsidiary of Microsoft, we expect things will only get better for companies that own - or are considering - FAST ESP. Microsoft has committed to support existing FAST customers for 10 years; they are actively coding upgrades to the product including those for SharePoint; and the breadth and quality of documentation shold improve. Many of the questions that some have raised about FAST's operating history or complexity seem to be settled, and the feature set and technology should play an important part on much of the search technology offered by Microsoft from desktop to internet.