Enterprise Search Experts
In a recent blog post by CTO Bjørn Olstad, referenced by CNet, Beyond Search and Norwegian digi.no today, FAST announces that ESP 5.3 is the last version of their Enterprise Search Platform to run on Linux or Unix.
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.
Yesterday, Microsoft/FAST announced at the FAST Forward conference in Las Vegas the immediate roadmap of the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product line. Also see what CMS Watch writes about the topic.
The main news is that ESP will be included in Office 14, to serve as the advanced/extended search server of Sharepoint. It has long been a problem that the Sharepoint Search Server can only handle about 50 million documents, and by offering the FAST-based extension, this will be extended to almost infinite number of docs, as well as enabling some features which Sharepoint did not have as well (faceted navigation being one of them). The product will be more limited than the full-fledged ESP in that you cannot tune as many parameters. Much of the middleware and administrative components of ESP are stipped out and replaced with Windows/Sharepoint/MSSQL components, for a tighter integration.
But Office14 will not ship before 2010, so as a gap-filler Microsoft will sell ESP for Sharepoint for as little as USD 25.000 per server, which is a fraction of the typical license cost for such a system. This product is basically the same as today’s ESP, but if you intend to upgrade to Office 14 Extended Search, you better not use all the features of ESP, but stick to the recommended customization options which are compatible with the coming Office 14 search.
The second product announced is “FAST Search for Internet Business”, intended to fill the needs of the typical existing FAST customer within site search or e-commerce. Even the Linux versions of this product will be developed and maintained alongside the Windows versions.
A good question is how MS/FAST is going to maintain all these code bases going forward. I’d expect a consolidation sooner or later, and perhaps also an end-of-life announcement for the Linux platform support within the next 5 years. But that will only be speculations anyway 
In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.
Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:
“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”
Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!
Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!
PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com
As of feb 8th it is official, Microsoft has aquired 97,2% of FAST, and can now legally force the buyout of the rest. Microsoft have been very active on the acquisition front lately, also trying a hostile takeover of Yahoo to gain a share of the global online advertising market which Google currently dominates. There is definitely a cosolidation in the search market towards fewer, bigger players.
With the FAST ESP technology, Microsoft will be able to compete better in the Enterprise search space. It is strange how come the world’s largest software firm does not manage to be innovative themselves, but have to buy other companies all the time to be able to really compete. It will be interesting to observe MS’s long-term roadmap for the FAST technology.
Microsoft has offered to buy FAST. See press release from Microsoft. This is said not to influence business for FAST customers, but it is very likely that the major focus for FAST ESP will shift from Linux to Windows and from Java-based to “other” technologies.
Nobody knows exactly yet but we all hope that Microsoft (if allowed to acquire FAST) will continue to support FAST ESP on all major Operating Systems going forward.