Fast Search & Transfer ASA (
FAST) is a
Norwegian company based in
Oslo. FAST focuses on
data search technologies. It had offices located in
Germany,
Italy,
Sri Lanka,
France,
Japan, the
United Kingdom, the
United States,
Brazil,
Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.
On April 24, 2008, Microsoft acquired FAST. FAST is now known as Microsoft Development Center Norway.
FAST offered an
enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a
service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provided a flexible framework for creating
ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offered a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company was developing
PHAROS, a new European multimedia
search engine.