FAST Unveils Enterprise Search Platform FAST ESP 5
FAST ESP 5 with Contextual Insight Redefines Enterprise Search by Delivering Precise Answers, Deep Analysis, and Extreme Scalability to Improve Corporate Performance and Increase Profits
OSLO, Norway and Needham, MA 6 February 2006 Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), the leading developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions, today announced the availability of the next generation of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP), FAST ESP 5. The release of FAST ESP 5 defines a new era in search: the platforms new Contextual InsightTM capability delivers precise answers to questions, and provides all users with the most intelligent search experience developed, enabling knowledge workers to solve business problems intuitively and with confidence.
FAST ESP 5 empowers organizations and both their external and internal users with a secure, unified point of access to all structured, unstructured, and rich media data. FAST ESP is already powering critical business functions such as risk management, surveillance, information management, eCommerce, online publishing, and mobile search. Many organizations have made FAST ESP a strategic element of their IT infrastructure, leveraging its power across all information resources to streamline business operations and to create new sources of revenue.
At Factiva we are constantly advancing our offerings and our capabilities to meet the needs of the rapidly-changing marketplace. FAST shares this vision, and its solutions play an important role in our business, said Clare Hart, CEO of Factiva. Our relationship is a perfect example of how innovative technology can contribute to business excellence. Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, provides essential business news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable professionals to make better decisions faster.
The volume of data in a large organization doubles every year. Left unchecked, this information explosion threatens businesses ability to respond quickly to market and environment changes, explained John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST. Enterprise search is quickly becoming one of the most important investments companies can make to protect their futures, improve corporate performance, drive down costs, and increase profits. To that end, FAST ESP 5 provides unparalleled capabilities to the marketplace, and will be a driving force behind our customers successes for years to come.
Search has become ubiquitous with the use of devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, breaking down barriers between content and the ability to access that content. FAST ESP 5 addresses the fact that companies who previously defined themselves by the content they own, must now differentiate themselves by how easily and efficiently individuals can access and act upon that content.
The new era of search is also significantly impacting traditional IT functions and the delivery of content. Organizations are applying enterprise search toward more efficient and cost-effective alternatives to data warehousing, or as a means to obviate the need for costly application integration technologies.
New in FAST ESP 5:
Contextual Insight(tm)
Unlike basic search solutions, FAST ESP 5 returns answers to questions not just references to places where the answers might be and does it faster, in a more tightly controlled scope, and with greater analysis of surrounding context. Contextual Insight, the underlying technology behind this capability, is the fusion of information retrieval and information analysis. Equipped with Contextual Insight, FAST ESP 5 delivers faster and more accurate answers, resulting in higher worker productivity, faster discovery times, higher lead-to-buy conversion rates, and increased profits.
Contextual Insight makes information previously locked deep inside documents easily accessible to users. FASTs revolutionary fact-based search technology unifies extreme document repositories containing text, structured data, and rich media, and delivers search answers with extreme precision and relevancy, explained Bjrn Olstad, CTO of FAST. FAST ESP 5 will change the way organizations use search to accelerate and transform their business models and operations."
Search Business Center
At the heart of FAST ESP 5 is the new FAST Search Business Center providing a new and holistic view for search management. Using the FAST Search Business Center, a non-technical user can effectively set up and tune a number of different search applications, all running from a single FAST ESP installation. The FAST Search Business Center provides an intuitive, workflow-based user interface to enable centralized search management, tuning, configuration, monitoring, and reporting. FAST ESP 5 brings unmatched usability and flexibility to enterprise search, with dramatically reduced cost of installation and operation.
Extreme Scalability
FAST ESP 5 does not just scale, it scales efficiently. Numerous clients have migrated from other search technologies to FAST and have decreased hardware costs by two to five times, while gaining significant improvements in performance, response and accuracy. FAST excels in solving the most extreme problems: FAST ESP has processed over 2,000 queries per second, over 40 petabytes of data, and packed more than 200 million documents of its index on a single low-cost commodity server. It has piloted clients starting at 10 billion documents, and provided analytics on over 200 parameters monitoring real-time trade data.
Increased Flexibility
FAST ESP 5 provides extreme flexibility to work within any environment due to its Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This enables easy customization and adaptation, or easy and rapid development of new game changing search-based solutions. The FAST platform is an open information retrieval system, vendor agnostic, and supports all major platforms and operating systems, development and interface languages, storage configurations and content sources and destinations. FAST ESP 5s superior flexibility dramatically reduces implementation and maintenance costs and total cost of ownership.
"Contextual Insight is a major leap forward, and will truly change the way users can search for information," commented Carel de Bos, CIO of Reed Business, a division of Reed Elsevier, a world leading publisher of information for professional users. "FAST solutions enable the delivery of superior online market information including magazines, exhibitions, directories, media, and marketing services to millions of professionals across a diverse range of business. FAST's innovation and commitment to our company are key elements of our success."
As the fastest growing company in the enterprise search industry we transformed the landscape two years ago when we brought our first version of FAST ESP to the market. Our platforms unified view of enterprise data, its security, scalability, and usability sets a new standard for intelligent search, explained Ali I. Riaz, president of FAST. The launch of FAST ESP 5, with Contextual Insight and its extreme scalability and superior capability to build differentiating solutions, will profoundly change the way organizations do business.
About FAST
FAST is the leading developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions that are behind the scenes at the worlds best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FASTs flexible and scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP) elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FASTs solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo.
FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.
2006 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer, FAST, FAST ESP, Contextual Insight and the FAST logo are trademarks of Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved.
Source: FAST
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