Microsoft Has Announced A Takeover Bid For Fast Search & Transfer Priced At $1.2 Billion

Growth through acquisition is an interesting strategy but these are some big numbers, a drop in the bucket to Microsoft but still… how many “search” related companies are they going to buy out in the hopes of regaining lost territory to linux and others? I can’t believe that Microsoft doesn’t have several departments covering each aspect of what this company offers already.

Jon
http://buzvia.com - Share Influence

Microsoft have acquired many companies over the year such as Hotmail ect.. Some how Google always beat them by launching services such as Gmail to compete with Microsoft.

$1.2B is a big price to be paying, but like Google with the YouTube acquisition it seems the biggest companies in the tech industry are not afraid to spend in order to gain.

Like Jon on the first comment above, I also agree that ‘growth though acquisition” is a very interesting strategy. Microsoft already has the live search engine and with other search products on the market Microsoft can expand there offering and quality of service.

Jason
http://www.lushable.com Lushable

Will that accelerate live search functionality?

I’d say Fast is a more interesting company than most. It probably shows that when it comes to search technology companies can indeed create unique competences that aren’t easily replicated even by MSFT, and that search technology and its applications are key capabilities when it comes to managing and exploiting the sea of data and content now out there.

Brian

Fast is kind of a collection of second-rate products that get used by governments and unsophisticated customers. Take a look at their site. Have you ever seen such a small company supporting so many products? They can’t all be good. Google could eventually give enterprise search for free and kill this business.

WTF, they would pay 1.2 billion for a company that has an alexa rating of 182K ? This means about 300 visitors per day. I mean come on… for those of us reading here with big websites ( my website for example has about 43 000 users per day ) this might seem like an over estimation. There’s so much double cross going on in this industry it’s not even funny. Some major investments keep flowing into websites that will never grow and never profit. I just dont understand, the people behind the acquisitions are pure idiots ( not all ) but ow my god i’m about to bang my head through the wall i can’t bear to stand this idiocy to spend 1.2 billion on some 300 people per day site instead of doing something worthwhile with that money like starting up a site just like theirs it probably takes 2 days to code(done more complicated sites in less time) and 1 million $ to promote wtf were they thinking.

The price maybe high but Fast is a pretty interesting company. They lead the pack in terms of enterprise search. I think their management could use a lot of what Microsoft offers.

@ man

Dude, FAST is an enterprise search company, their site visitor numbers are totally irrelevant to their business. They have had $162m revenue in 2006 from selling search and ecommerce solutions to enterprises, some 65% up from 2005. This is an entirely different business from Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live.

As an aside, Microsoft has been working with FAST, their Windows Marketplace is driven by FAST’s ImPulse ecommerce solution. My assumption would be that Microsoft liked what they saw when they worked with FAST and thought they should buy the company.

@jens

ok well if there’s an underground backend like that - that i simply ignored, then i should stfu.

Guys,

This is a brilliant acquisition for Microsoft. Gartner says that Microsoft is struggling in this (already crowded) market. FAST is recognized as an industry-leader, along with Autonomy, Endeca, ZyLab, etc.

The other thing to keep in mind is Microsoft’s biggest bet, which is its DYNAMICS (ERP/CRM) division. Because Business Objects was acquired by SAP, Microsoft possibly became more compelled to make an acquisition. Enterprise Search is going to be an absolutely massive component of ERP in the coming years, and this is a market that is strategic for Microsoft.

The move by Microsoft has just proved that we are moving into a right direction with our free site search program. I wonder if they will make all FAST product free of charge and ad-supported. To offer a free search to enterprise and consumer websites is a big market opportunity. As an example, see a Quintura ‘cloud’ for site search in the sidebar on http://altsearchengines.com

@5 (stone),

Yeah, Zoho supports that many products, and all of them suck.

Microsoft ALREADY gave away enterprise search - http://www.microsoft.com/enter.....fault.aspx

Not to mention the search that came with Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) also free.

And excellent search that comes with MOSS full blow SharePoint server.

Another stupid move by Microsoft. Right now US economy is going to recession. How long till IT budgets get cut and enterprise search becomes second priority? I don’t think FAST product costs that much. They seem to specialize in semantic search which has long been known as vaporware. So it’s mainly a sales company selling “snake oil” and these companies do poorly during recession.

They should have waited and bought whatever technology it offered at far cheaper prices. In any case, Microsoft without Bill Gates isn’t the same. They have only two cash cows now - Windows and Office and some success with the Servers division. But they have spent tons of money trying to enter other markets and have failed every single time.

2 Dyde, with all due respect, you don’t know what you are talking about.

I wonder if this will put Endeca in play.

Maybe Microsoft can see through this and its not as serious as it looks to the outside world…

Issues with Board of Directors

The conduct of Fast’s directors has been the subject of much comment in Norway. In Jan 2006 a article ran in the Norwegian IT paper that claimed that one of FAST’s directors Tomas Fussel had made a 2000% markup for himself by buying a loss making company Hercules communications and selling it to the public company Fast 3 weeks later for a massive mark up. [10]

More recently there has been controversy at the board level with one director resigning and another making public statements about other directors and major shareholders. Fast’s board member Robert Keith said in a newspaper interview , “I ought to have seen the problems in Fast earlier. And I ought to have understood that Hans Gude Gudesen is a crazy liar. Also, I ought to have shot Oystein Stray Spetalen the first time I met him. That would have helped a lot of people, says the controversial Brit to the paper [Finansavisen].” Spetalen and Hans Gude Gudesen are both major shareholders in Fast. Furthermore directors Keith and Fussel are allegedly being pursued by the Norwegian tax authorities for $50M in unpaid taxes the government says it is owed by them. In the event of non payment liability may fall on the company. I should have shot Spetalen.

The ongoing turmoil has seen 3 directors resign from the board in the last month, the latest being Johan Fredrik Odfjell who is quoted in the company’s release as saying `FAST faces many challenges and opportunities going forward’

On December the 22nd Orka FAST’s largest shareholder demanded an EGM to force Fussel and Keith off the board

[edit] Need to Restate Accounts for 2006 and 2007

On the 12th of December 2007 Oslo Bors suspended trading of FAST shares. The next morning the company announced it was reviewing the accounting utilized for the 2006 and 2007 reports with a likely outcome that this would be changed. In an article titled “Fast restates its accounts” http://www.dagensit.no stated that Fasts results for 2006 and 2007 may be restated in what it called ” another clean up round.” It also stated “The Search technology vendor Fast Search & Transfer have had several rounds with restating of accounts. Also after CFO Joseph Lacson some months ago declared that “everything is cleaned up” one has found skeletons in the closet. Wednesday afternoon trading was suspended, after what the stock exchange called “certain conditions”.

@Dyde

FAST has a huge and stable customer base. They are the leaders in enterprise search. A good chunk of their business comes from outside the US and would be therefore immune to a US recession. They are not some fly by night company peddling vaporware. They are a very established company with solid products.

You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about.

And I want my two minutes back for responding to your post.

@simon

I have no idea if your information about the Board of Directors of FAST is accurate or not, but I will start checking out the story. This sort of post is exactly why I continue to read the comments on TechCrunch despite the pain everyday of wading through remarks such as those by Dyde and man on this thread.

@Angry Joe,

No doubt FAST has customers. That doesn’t mean its product is essential and will be needed during a recession. They are essentially selling “snake oil”, as most enterprises were doing just fine before FAST was founded. Which means that FAST’s services will not be needed during a recession. And which means Microsoft could have bought it later, at far cheaper price.

And these two reports seem to augment my opinion:

http://www.fastsearch.com/Q1-0.....a.pdf.file
http://www.fastsearch.com/Q2-0.....2.pdf.file

FAST’s profits are taking a beating and yet Microsoft is overpaying for them.

As far as the rest of the world being immune to US recession, most of the FAST customers are in US and Western Europe. I suggest you do some research before stating that Western Europe is immune to US recession. Arguments like “You don’t know WYTA” do not count as research.

@Angry Joe,

No doubt FAST has customers. That doesn’t mean that its service is immune to recession. It’s main offeric is essentially a “semantic enterprise search platform”, and FYI semantic search has never been proven to be effective and is widely considered as vaporware. So it is essentially a company selling “snake oil”. Enterprises were doing just fine before FAST was founded, which means that during the recession FAST’s services will have lower demand. If MS wanted to buy whatever tech FAST had it could have waited for recession to hit and bought it then.

These two reports and the scandal story posted above seem to augment my point:

http://www.fastsearch.com/Q1-0.....a.pdf.file
http://www.fastsearch.com/Q2-0.....2.pdf.file

If you know how to read fin. statements you’ll see that FAST’s profits are taking a beating.

Regarding your statement that FAST would be immune to US recession, most of its non US customers are in Western Europe. I suggest you learn some macroeconomics and do some research before stating that Western Europe is immune to US recession. Statements like “You don’t know WYTA” is not an argument.

Maybe you’re a MS fanboy and think that MS can’t do no wrong but you have to agree that MS could have gotten a better deal if it wanted an “enterprise search” company. Paying 42% over the share price is stupid just as it was stupid to pay 250mln to Facebook for a 5% stake in a company with no real business model.

If you look at FAST’s management team, the FAST CFO used to work for Steve Ballmer. No doubt this was one of the reasons why they managed to negotiate a better deal than could be expected.

Fast is a great company, but am I wrong if I say that Yahoo! left it on the table when they bought Overture/Altavista/alltheweb? A left-over which is now worth 1.2 billion dollars. Great move