In a not-so-shocking move,this week Microsoft announced that it was dropping support for the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP) on Linux and other Unix operating systems. Microsoft acquired the FAST ESP and related products in January 2008 via the $1.2B acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer, a financially troubled but nevertheless leading enterprise search vendor, headquartered in Norway.
Microsoft’s move was announced in blog post with the misleading title of Innovation on Linux and UNIX, written by former Fast CTO and Microsoft distinguished engineer, Bjørn Olstad, and posted on the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog. Excerpt:
With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.
The Register put it somewhat less diplomatically: Microsoft Kills Fast’s Linux and Unix Search Business.
The real question for Fast customers is: “what next?”
Here are my (not necessarily unbiased) views on the subject.
- If you were using Fast for vanilla enterprise search, then either move to Windows with Microsoft or move to the Google Appliance. Basic enterprise search has commoditized; there’s no reason to pay top dollar for the Intranet crawl-and-index value proposition.
- If you were using Fast as an application development platform, perhaps alongside a relational database as a means of enabling applications that query both structured and unstructured content, then you should call Mark Logic.
- If you were using Fast for e-commerce search, then you should call Endeca, provided you don’t mind that they are focused on becoming a BI company. Jabs aside, Endeca’s core strength is in e-commerce search, so I would check them out.
- If you are a glutton for punishment, enjoy working with search products that use black box algorithms based on Bayes and Shannon, from a company no longer interested in search but instead focused on financial engineering through mergers and acquisitions, then you should definitely look at Autonomy.
- If you used Fast in either the media/publishing or government sectors, you should call Mark Logic. Mark Logic has strong practices in both media and government and for years, particularly in media, Fast was our #1 competitor. In media, we help build applications including custom publishing, rights management, role-based information applications, and multi-channel content delivery. In government, we work on applications that include content analytics, information sharing environments, metadata catalogs, government archives, and open source intelligence systems.
- If you used Fast in financial services, you should call Mark Logic. While this is a newer practice area, we have done work with derivatives contracts, FpML derivatives repositories, and equity and fixed income research publishing.
If you’re interested in more on this topic, below please find embedded a white paper we released in January — prior to knowing that Microsoft was discontinuing Fast support on Unix — which argues why media / publishing companies should consider moving to MarkLogic. It’s even more relevant now than when we released it.
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1 Run FAST to Open-Source Search « Sematext Blog // Feb 13, 2010 at 4:37 am
[...] decision to turn off the FAST@Linux dollar faucet. Over at Kellblog, the Mark Logic CEO already itemized whose door the current FAST@Linux customers might want to knock on next depending on what they are [...]
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