Search Computing Blog

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (recursive acronym FAST) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has 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 closed its acquisition of FAST. FAST is now known as FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.

FAST offers an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offers 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 is developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine. FAST is notable for a major ongoing investigation by the Norwegian police into accounting fraud around the inflation of revenues and profits which has led to police raids on its offices.

[Source Wikipedia ]

[Website http://www.fastsearch.com/]

Autonomy Corporation PLC is an enterprise software company with joint head quarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and San Francisco, USA. The company uses a combination of technologies borne out of research at the University of Cambridge . It develops a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference (statistical inference in which evidence or observations are used to update or to newly infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true) in conjunction with traditional methods. In January 2009, it entered the Enterprise Content Management Space through its acquisition of Interwoven.

It has grown rapidly from a starup in 1996 and is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange. It is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index and is the UK’s largest software company by market cap.

[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy_Corporation]

[Website http://www.autonomy.com/]