Today, the deal where Microsoft buys FAST, was completed. That means that the Norwegian search engine vendor Fast Search & Transfer is now a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

The FAST ESP product will continue to be offered on all current platforms, and the FAST sales and tech organization continues to operate almost as before, so customers and users will not experience any noise around this transaction.

FAST, when under the MS umbrella, will of course increase focus within the MS Office Sharepoint segment, and will together with MS engineers make an even smoother packaging of the technologies to new and existing customers of high-end Sharepoint sites with large data volumes.

Expect to see continued innovation from FAST in the years to come, and expect also to see a shift towards stronger support for the Windows platform. It is a known fact that the Linux platform has been the most stable up until now for ESP, but now this might shift as Windows versions will get the major focus in QA and patching.

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported, and also this blog post by MS’s Kirk Koenigsbauer in the Sharepoint division states that “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice“. Let’s hope that lasts for many many years to come, so that history can be re-written in this area.

Congratulations, Microsoft, with an excellent new member organization

Congratulations, John Marcus Lervik with the new role of leading MS’s Enterprise Search Business!

See also official press release and FAST’s customer FAQ