FAST

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) was a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It had 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 acquired FAST. FAST is now known as Microsoft Development Center Norway. FAST offered an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provided a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offered 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 was developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine.