Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search software company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) merits a closer look. Not just because it’s a fairly large acquisition by Microsoft’s standards (£600m in cash), but because of what it says about the overall state of information management within the enterprise.
Microsoft owns what I like to call the means of information production, eg Office. MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook are the tools used to create the vast majority of the world’s unstructured information; that is information not usually stored in a relational database or more accurately, not usefully stored in a relational database. Obviously Outlook emails are managed usually using an Exchange email server. But information created using Word, Excel and PowerPoint mostly resides on intranet file systems, on desktops and increasingly, on Microsoft’s Sharepoint server. Studies have shown that information workers waste many hours each week trying to find information that has already been created – often by themselves – because of the lack of good enterprise-wide search tools.
But Microsoft has done very little – even after the introduction of SharePoint in 2001 – to help CIOs not only get their arms around all this unstructured information, but more pertinently, to figure out what it is, where it is, how valuable or risky it is and how most effectively to store it. The acquisition of FAST should be seen in that context, as it has the potential to change all that.
Mini-industries have sprung up around SharePoint, as is common with such a widely deployed piece of critical software as SharePoint. Microsoft claims at least 85 million SharePoint server users worldwide and it accounted for about _400m in sales in the year to 30 June 2007. There are lots of ways to poke holes in these numbers, but adoption of SharePoint – both the server and the free Windows SharePoint services – is happening on a large scale. Not surprisingly Microsoft has described Sharepoint as the fastest-growing product in its history.
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