Business Wire — FAST Introduces Business Intelligence Built on Search

29 January 2007
London — Fast Search, the leading developer of search technologies, today unveiled the FAST Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), a radically new approach that lets users capitalize on their entire universe of information to make better informed decisions for competitive advantage. Built on a robust search platform, FAST AIW integrates an end-to-end framework of products that achieves a previously unattainable unification of search and Business Intelligence.

FAST AIW fundamentally redefines Business Intelligence with a shift away from the traditional data warehouse. AIW directly addresses the limitations of data warehouses — cost, architecture complexity, and limited scalability — as well as the inherent restrictions on traditional Business Intelligence tools that cannot deliver timely, dynamic data to all users.

FAST’s product is not before time. BI, data warehousing and the like have for too long inhabited a separate world from that of unstructured search. There are mountains of memos, emails, contracts, customer contact notes, warranty claims and the like in any organization. All this contains useful and important information, if it can be found and extracted.

Even where an organization is smart enough to put a good search tool to work on that raw unstructured data (and that’s rare enough), it unlikely to be able to find software that allows it to present the results unified with information from structured sources.

This is an endemic problem within the software industry. Getting search vendors and BI vendors to talk about it is like taking a group of right-blind people to an sculpture gallery where they meet a group of left-blind people. Neither group sees the same thing. Their members talk only about their particular and lopsided view of the artefacts in front of their eyes. An in-the-round appreciation is next to impossible to achieve. Consensus is out of reach.

It may be that FAST has the necessary three-dimensional vision. I hope to be able to say more about its intentions in a few days, on the IT Analysis Web site.

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