FAST LAUNCHES SEARCH BEST PRACTICES CONSULTING SERVICE

NEEDHAM, MA — 16 February 2005 — Fast Search & Transfer™ (FAST™), the leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, today announced the launch of its FAST Search Best Practices™ consulting services (FAST SBP™). Designed to help clients maximize the value they extract from their investment in search technology, FAST SBP provides organizations with the framework to fully understand their true opportunities, and the tools to optimize their search related results and develop mechanisms to deploy, manage, and continuously improve their enterprise search solution.

“While enterprise search technology has evolved as a significant and vital piece of many IT infrastructures, a large majority of businesses are still unaware of the great potential that search holds for aggregating, unifying and retrieving both structured and unstructured information to leverage all of their information assets,” said Ali I. Riaz, FAST’s chief operating officer. “FAST SBP helps companies address these challenges head-on, and enables them to maximize the return on their technology investments through improved organizational efficiency and strategic business growth. The services are provided in a vendor-agnostic manner, as the customer’s unique circumstances and strategic objectives are the core and key focus of this offering.”

FAST SBP consultants utilize their many years of experience implementing cutting edge search solutions for Global 1000 companies to objectively assist corporations in solving their business challenges through enterprise search technology. These experiences have been captured into a methodology that facilitates a highly effective and focused knowledge transfer, and provides detailed recommendations for exploiting the potential of modern search technologies. The FAST SBP consultants are improvement catalysts for enterprise search.

Through FAST SBP, clients exploit broad search experience in a collaborative partnership, from interviews with stakeholders, through a series of recommendations to optimize their use of search technology and prioritize existing and future projects. FAST SBP supports clients from initial concepts through deployment and expansion throughout the organization. Positive impacts to the bottom line are achieved by not only improving efficiencies, but also by enabling new business models and opportunities to drive revenues and cut costs.

While FAST SBP is a newly announced service, FAST has provided consulting advice to many global customers, including Elsevier MD Consult, which has seen clear benefits. "Using FAST's Search Best Practices service allowed us to validate our strategic business objectives and vision, and also helped us to identify areas to maximize the search experience for our customers,” commented Kathy Davidson, Vice President and General Manager, Elsevier MD Consult. “As a result, we have a better understanding around our current plans, as well has a better roadmap to take us forward."

WHY FAST SBP?
The information infrastructure of a large corporation is a highly complex and dynamic system, typically addressing multiple challenges, including:
• Organizational complexity – numerous stakeholders and interests
• Technical complexity – complex products and environments
• High risk – strategic and significant investment
• Unclear ROI/TCO – vague or neglected cost/benefit analyses
• Converging marketplace –increasing threat from non-traditional competitors
• Changing users – lack of end-user understanding due to quickly changing usage patterns
• Few benchmarks – uncertainty about typical KPIs, benchmarks, and other data

To meet these challenges, strong search experience and expertise are required. This expertise comes from a highly specialized background, with up-to-date knowledge of competitive usage patterns in the marketplace and of the latest search features that can be used as effective competitive differentiators.

FAST SBP OFFERINGS

FAST SBP provides organizations with two engagement options:

1. FAST SBP FOCUS – a half-day workshop designed to help existing and prospective customers focus on the immediate goals of their search implementation; and

2. FAST SBP TOTAL – a multi-day workshop designed as a deep knowledge transfer, helping organizations to analyze and review complex strategic questions, unique sets of functional requirements, and specific technical questions.

FAST SBP helps organizations prioritize projects to ensure they receive optimal return from their search investment. FAST supports its customers in a pro-active partnership model from initial concepts, through deployment and expansion throughout the organization. Through a small investment in effort – by focusing on the most relevant aspects of search and by better understanding its central place in the broader information infrastructure – companies achieve a significant impact on the bottom line, not only by improving efficiencies, but also by enabling new business models and opportunities to drive revenues and cut costs.

Search is the de-facto way to access information on the Internet. Recent market trends show that search is also becoming an important infrastructure enabler inside enterprises. Search technology has matured to a new level of feature richness, performance, availability, and usability where it now acts as a truly strategic tool. Hence, enterprises cannot afford to ignore the internal efficiencies and the external strategic differentiators that powerful Enterprise Search Platforms (ESPs) offer. ESPs are truly redefining the information landscape both from a business and technical standpoint, and the growth of the ESP market promises to track, if not eclipse, the markets of applications it enables, such as CRM, ERP, and content management.

The ESP has become the tool to unify and access the lifeblood of all enterprises, their information assets; yet, many organizations still often treat it as an afterthought. This knowledge gap is ignored at great risk; taking a strategic perspective on search is the rational choice. FAST SBP is the first comprehensive framework enabling the process of turning ESP into a strategic differentiator.

For more information on FAST SBP, please visit http://www.fastsearch.com/sbp, e-mail sbp@fastsearch.com or call +1 (888) 871-3839.

FAST has transformed enterprise search from a powerful, yet narrowly perceived function, into an enterprise-wide strategic and tactical capability of pivotal importance. FAST ESP and FAST’s portfolio of solutions and Search Derivative Applications (SDAs) supply a complete information retrieval solution ideal for a growing number of key vertical markets and applications including e-Commerce and Internet Portals, Financial Services; Government; Life Sciences; Media and Publishing; and Telecom. For FAST, the search never stops.

ABOUT FAST
FAST creates the real-time search and filter technology solutions that are behind the scenes at the world’s best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST’s flexible and scalable integrated technology platform elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FAST’s powerful enterprise search technology solutions are used by more than 1,500 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), AT&T, Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, FirstGov.gov (GSA), IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Nordstrom, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo.

FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Additionally, the FAST Group has business partners and customers in a number of other locations, such as Brazil, Canada and Australia. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

© 2005 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer, FAST, FAST ESP, FAST Data Search, FAST Marketrac, FAST AdVisor, FAST InStream, FAST ImPulse, FAST Search Best Practices, FAST SBP and the FAST four-colored logo are trademarks of Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved. FAST disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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