As it prepares to bid goodbye to Bill Gates, Microsoft looks set to get serious about enterprise search.
The US software giant has made an offer for Norwegian real-time search and filter technology company Fast Search & Transfer, pitched at Kr19 a share, with a statement to the Oslo stock exchange.
That represents a hefty 42 per cent premium to Fast Search’s close of Kr13.35 last Friday and values the business at Kr6.6bn (or about $1.2bn).
Enterprise search is software aimed at reducing the amount of time that workers spend looking for ‘stuff’ – meaning the information needed to do their jobs more effectively. The phrase encompasses a variety of products and technologies from companies such as the UK’s Autonomy, as well as offerings from Google and IBM, which make it possible to extract information quickly from a range of structured and unstructured sources. Unlike a straight-forward internet search, an enterprise search engine must be able to understand information stored in numerous different formats and to extract it.
It’s an area in which Microsoft has been notable by its relative absence – though the company launched its free Search Server 2008 Express last November, based on technology from 2007′s SharePoint Server. Fast Search however operates at the high end, offering customisable, flexible operations. The combination of the two, Microsoft said on Tuesday, would create a single vendor of enterprise search solutions spanning the entire spectrum of customers’ needs.
Microsoft has won the approval of the board of Fast Search – and the support of 37 per cent of the company’s shareholders, including the two largest institutional investors, Orkla and Hermes. The deal requires 90 per cent of shareholders to approve the offer.
[Update: Microsoft has made a further statement to the Oslo stock exchange that it has bought up 17m shares in Fast Search, or just over 5 per cent of the company.]
[Update 11.22am: They're really going for it. Microsoft now has 10.1 per cent of its quarry.]
The pair already have links. In December, Fast Search said it had won a contract to provide its e-commerce product, Fast Impulse, to Microsoft.
Goldman advised Microsoft on the deal, while Merrill Lynch acted as adviser to Fast. Shares in Fast Search jumped more than 40 per cent on Tuesday, to Kr18.9 a share.