After the Microsoft takeover of FAST almost three years ago, it’s been silent and no new updates of ESP. We all know that MS discontinued Linux support, and that the major focus with the FAST technology has been to power the high-end search for Sharepoint 2010. ESP was forked and heavily modified to integrate smoothly with Windows, SQL server, AD, PowerShell and more, and it made the leap to 64 bit – finally!

But what about non Sharepoint users? MS has an offering to them as well, called FAST Search for Internet Sites. Read Comperio’s excellent blog article about it. A bit disappointing that the core is still the more than three year old ESP5.3 wrapped in new MS APIs, but cool that you can still hack the ESP internals.. (more…)

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.

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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.