FAST ESP is the world’s leading, most advanced search platform,
delivering secure, relevant answers and insight to accelerate
decisions, improve corporate performance, and increase profits.
What we deliver
We do not simply search, we find. We filter out all the irrelevant,
peripheral data and provide the exact information end users are
looking for. After all, people are not interested in searching
– they are interested in finding. That is why we provide
answers, not references to somewhere that might contain the answer.
Looking ahead (something we do constantly), we believe that search
will be everywhere all the time; an indispensable part of everyone’s
lives. It will be source and device independent. It will be proactive
rather than reactive. It will follow people around and be contextually
aware. It will suggest, alert, and inform. It needs to be FAST.
Contextual Insight™
Who, what, where, when, and why. We answer them, even when they
are not explicitly asked, by bringing intelligence and insight
to information retrieval. Merging contextually aware search technology,
flexible content structuring, and integrated text and data mining,
we have created the concept of ‘Contextual Insight’.
This brings new sophistication to the search function. It is now
possible, for instance, to retrieve the one sentence in which
someone says something positive about a particular brand, or to
return a list of people in a particular profession, or the answer
to a basic question. Sometimes ‘yes’ is all you need.
Clumsy, blunt-edged searching is coming to an end.
Contextual navigation
An effective search interface should be more than a search bar
with results. Information retrieval solutions should have efficient,
dynamic navigation techniques to improve the general query experience.
We have developed ‘Entity Discovery’ for instance,
featuring the ability to extract people, places, locations, dates
– we have more than 40 entity types in our library and a
standard method for defining your own – and then displaying
them as navigators dynamically on each search. With FAST, our
navigators promote exploration and uncover answers much faster
than through the search bar. Faster answers, via fewer clicks,
mean higher productivity and better user retention.
Extreme performance
When the numbers get extreme, are you confident your system will
scale efficiently? Remember, you are paying for the hardware.
We distribute our work across commodity machines and optimize
for query-heavy, data-heavy, and real-time systems, or any combination
thereof. We have pilot projects that begin at 10 billion documents,
accounts which have reached thousands of queries per second and
more than 2000 product updates a second, demands for hundreds
of millions of documents on a single machine, and a prospect who
has over 40 petabytes of data. Efficient scalability means lower
total cost of ownership, which means faster return on your assets.
Significant improvement in performance could even change your
business.
Deeper analysis
We analyze. And we dig deep. To us, a true enterprise information
retrieval solution should provide both quantitative and qualitative
analyses. A selling pattern raises an alert. What are people saying
about the stock? Information analysis has historically been an
expensive and time-consuming operation, with most of the effort
dedicated to retrieval and preparation. With the advent of search
as the retrieval mechanism, it seems natural to bring the two
disciplines together. Search unveils the power of analytics, making
your knowledge workforce more productive.
Maximum transparency
What good is great technology when it cannot connect to your corporate
environment? Our solutions have an open, modular design. Maximum
transparency means being vendor agnostic and supporting all major
platforms and operating systems, development and interface languages,
storage configurations, and content sources. It means embracing
the extended platform – the back office, front office (desktop),
and mobile office – so that source and destination become
transparent. This is FAST. Transparency reduces implementation
costs, resulting in lower total cost of ownership and a faster
return on investment.
Tailored features
Just as each organization’s search needs are unique, each
FAST solution is totally tailored to the customer. We believe
that information access systems must be simple to customize and
extend, allowing the enterprise to define unique adaptable and
extensible indexing policies and user profiles with their own
configuration and relevancy logic. And we believe all of this
can be accomplished while the system is running.
Ease of management
Some technical solutions are so complex and costly to manage that
they never deliver their potential benefits. Our solutions are
different. They provide demonstrably beneficial, reliable services
and effective user interaction. Our Search Business Center, designed
for non-technical users, is a central hub for all monitoring,
administering, tuning, reporting, and managing of your search
environment. FAST solutions require minimal integration time,
cause less disruption and deliver a more rapid return on investment.
