Business Services Industry

IBM Japan and Fast Search & Transfer -FAST- Announce Sales Alliance for Real-Time Data-Intensive Search and Information Retrieval Solutions

Business Wire, Feb 8, 2002

Business/Technology Editors

TOKYO and OSLO, Norway--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2002

First Major Japanese Customer Has Been Secured

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a leading developer of search and real-time alerting technologies, and IBM Japan, Ltd. today announced that IBM Japan will market, sell, and provide systems integration (SI) services for FAST solutions in Japan. The alliance makes it possible for customers to improve access to highly customized information retrieval solutions across both enterprise and public sector networks, where demand for easily accessible information is increasing along with the growth of e-business. The first major Japanese customer contract has been secured.

"This alliance will enable us to enhance our e-business solution offerings to private and public sector customers with very powerful, scalable, and highly customizable real-time search and matching solutions that other companies cannot offer," said Takuma Otoshi, President of IBM Japan. "FAST solutions bring customers immediate and discernible benefits, which we witnessed firsthand after IBM chose FAST as search provider for ibm.com, our own e-business site."

"We are extremely excited about furthering our relationship with IBM. By combining our expertise with IBM, we can provide powerful end-to-end solutions that deliver relevant information to the right person at the right time, while fully leveraging the IT architectures of enterprise and public sector entities in Japan," said John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST. "Having our software and services available through this leading powerhouse player demonstrates that we not only have cutting-edge universal search technology, but our strategy of partnering with world class companies continues to be highly successful."

How it works

FAST's search and matching technology is designed specifically to tackle the real-time data-intensive search and information retrieval challenges of large-scale enterprises. It is ideally suited for corporate user environments in which large amounts of historical data exist and new data is constantly being generated and/or updated, or where any type or amount of business data needs to be searched in real-time. FAST Data Search offers inherent fault tolerance through its parallel architecture design, and provides sub-second response times in configurations ranging from a single server to advanced configurations with hundreds of servers scaling to more than 250 terabytes of data and capable of thousands of queries per second.

The FAST Data Search solution seamlessly integrates with an e-business' existing IT system, turning it into a powerful information retrieval system. FAST Data Search is the ideal solution for e-businesses. It increases the speed and performance of searches, leading to increases in customer loyalty, successfully completed transactions and, most importantly, generation of additional revenue.

Uses of FAST technology can be seen on the technology showcase AlltheWeb (www.alltheweb.com) where Web users can find a piece of information in under 0.5 second among 1.7 billion pages of data in 47 languages. This search not only covers text-based Web pages, image, video, MP3, program file, and real time news file formats, but also incorporates query analysis, dynamic clustering, and advanced personalized user interface options to yield a comprehensive internet search solution showcase.

FAST also announced the opening of an office in Tokyo, Japan to further extend its reach into the Japanese marketplace. The office will be primarily used for sales and marketing initiatives, as well as research and development related to the specific needs of Japanese customers.

About FAST

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) unlocks the ever-expanding volume of information on the Internet and within enterprise environments through a powerful platform of scalable search and real-time alert solutions. Patented products and services include the world's most comprehensive and freshest Web search engine, AlltheWeb (www.alltheweb.com), and high-capacity search and real-time content matching engines for the enterprise market. Market leaders relying on FAST's highly scalable and portable offerings include Broadvision, eBay, Ericsson, IBM, KPNQwest, Qwest, Reed Elsevier (Scirus.com), T-Online, Terra Lycos, Tiscali and TIBCO Software. FAST has operations in Europe and the United States, with research facilities in Norway. FAST shares are traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker FAST in Oslo, Norway. Please visit http://www.fastsearch.com/ for more information, or try www.alltheweb.com.

About IBM Japan Ltd.

IBM Japan was founded in 1937 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM World Trade Corporation. Today, the company has over 21,000 employees and over 100 offices in Japan. IBM Japan has research and development facilities at Yamato, Yasu and Fujisawa, and manufacturing facilities at Yasu and Fujisawa, Japan. For further information, please visit IBM Japan website: http://www.ibm.com/jp/.>