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FAST ESP
FAST ESP

Best-in-class enterprise search for the most demanding applications

FAST ESP is a best-in-class enterprise search solution for the most demanding enterprise search needs. FAST ESP can be extended through FAST ESP Add-Ons to provide additional business value and enhanced user experiences. Together, these solutions offer an extensible and scalable search platform that helps deliver intuitive user experiences and positive business results.

Key Benefits

  • Shape Intuitive User Experiences
    Guide people to the most relevant information using conversational search experiences that give them better answers. Tailor those experiences to meet the personalized needs of your people and your business.

  • Manage at Extreme Scale
    Tackle challenging requirements using an extensible and customizable search platform. Scale to meet any demand, while giving your business the control it needs to deliver relevant information through search-driven applications.

  • Deliver All the Content Users Want
    Unify structured and unstructured content. Extend content access to sources outside your organization. Enhance the meaning and structure of information to increase its value to your customers, employees, and partners.

Key Capabilities

  • Scalable platform
    Scale seamlessly with sub-second response time—even across extreme query loads and content volumes. Linear scalability for exceptional high-end price/performance.

  • Robust content retrieval
    Aggregate and transform structured and unstructured information across hundreds of document types. Configurable, flexible Web crawler and numerous content connectors. FAST Unity’s federation framework extends FAST ESP to blend and manage content from multiple search indexes and includes support for over 85 languages.

  • Configurable content pipelines
    Increase content value with prepackaged and custom modules that enhance and organize content at time of indexing. Advanced linguistics capabilities include entity and content extraction.

  • Business-tunable user experience control
    Tune the user experience to your specific business with configurable relevancy models, query processing, and results processing. Manage the user experience through a search business console. Facilitate user conversation with navigators, taxonomies, and clustering. Promote popular and premium content and products.

  • Programmable personalization
    Blend search and recommendations from FAST Recommendations. Deliver targeted promotions and personalized merchandizing through FAST ImPulse. Customize and apply user rank profiles dynamically as users navigate through your site.

  • Focused services and expertise: The partner ecosystem
    Get access to deep technical expertise and industry knowledge through our partner network. Powerful services and partner capabilities deliver best practice deployments and targeted vertical industry solutions.

Connect with a Microsoft Representative

To learn more about FAST ESP and FAST ESP Add-Ons

FAST ESP and Add-ons

  • FAST ESP
  • FAST Recommendations
  • FAST Unity
  • FAST ImPulse

Learn from Our Customers’ Successes

Customer Videos

Case Studies

Read More on FAST ESP and FAST ESP Add-Ons

Need Support?

For FAST technical support, email us or call +1 866-922-5260 
(8 A.M. – 8 P.M. Eastern Time)

FAST AdMomentum
FAST AdMomentum

FAST AdMomentum is an advertising and search monetization solution that allows companies to grow their online advertising revenue by selling and delivering targeted ads through their own in-house solution.

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Key Benefits

  • Grow your online advertising revenue
    Serve your existing advertisers, and help grow your advertiser base with more precise advertising targeting and higher return on investment (ROI). Boost margins through control over your advertising bid models. Leverage advertising inventory over multiple Web properties, including partner properties.

  • Increase control of your online advertising
    Manage and optimize your inventory. Integrate your ad-serving capabilities with existing systems and processes to create advertising models mapped to your business model. Offer advertisers and agencies transparency and flexibility.

  • Make better use of your online assets
    Target ads based on your knowledge of the content and audience. Help your advertisers reach new audiences.

Key Capabilities

  • Contextual and search-driven advertising
    Deliver advertisements targeted by your business rules, such as keywords, geographic location, language, and time of day. Or, blend these filters to create unique targeting options for advertisers. Advertisements can be delivered on search and content pages.

  • Self-service interface for advertisers
    Provide advertisers and agencies with an online interface to manage advertisements through the full life cycle—from campaign setup to performance reporting. Advertisers and agencies can be given control to define keywords, optimize bids, and define specific target audiences.

  • End-to-end application for publishers
    FAST AdMomentum’s rich back-office tools enable publishers to manage accounts, monitor advertisements, and optimize advertising revenue. It supports multiple performance models (including cost-per-click and cost-per-action) and control to configure ad ranking and to set minimum bids, and provides an advertiser billing and payment system.

Connect with a Microsoft Representative

To learn more about FAST ESP and FAST ESP Add-Ons

Learn More About FAST AdMomentum

Need Support?

For FAST technical support, email us or call +1 866-922-5260 
(8 A.M. – 8 P.M. Eastern Time)

FAST Services

FAST Solutions Services and Support Offerings

You need peace of mind and peak performance around the clock and around the world. That's why every FAST solution is supported by a team of experts to help minimize its installation effort and maximize its potential.

Whether you need to know that you’re running your search solutions at the lowest cost or your team members need training in FAST solutions, Microsoft provides services and support for every stage of a customer’s solution life cycle.

  • FAST Managed Search
    A total managed care offering for those seeking alternatives to managing their FAST search solutions in-house.

  • FAST Professional Services
    Consulting services that help your organization develop, implement, and manage FAST solutions—and to do so quickly and cost effectively.

  • FAST Search Business Consulting (FAST SBC)
    Consulting services that empower organizations to innovate and gain competitive advantage through search-enabled business transformation.

  • FAST Technical Support
    A service designed to resolve product-related issues and to address product-related questions quickly and efficiently.

  •  FAST University
    A structured learning service that provides technical training for customers and partners who want to gain an in-depth understanding of our search technology.


FAST Managed Search

FAST Managed Search cost-effectively handles your mission-critical search application. Our skilled technicians proactively monitor business changes that impact the search solution, performing regular index maintenance and performance tuning to make sure your solution adapts to changes in your business and keeps delivering peak performance. We also take care of routine management, providing monthly performance and service-level agreement (SLA) compliance reports and communicating early and often with your IT leaders.

To maintain your search installation effectively, FAST Managed Search:

  • Monitors your search application and its subsystems and provides you with reports on system health, performance, top queries, and more.

  • Optimizes performance by reviewing the application performance/relevancy, and implements recommended measures.

  • Provides around-the-clock hosting in a fully serviced FAST data center that exceeds Class 3 standards.

  • Maintains the search index to ensure continued high-quality search results.

  • Aligns application and maintenance road maps to organizational plans and priorities.

  • Maps implications of required changes to system load, user patterns, data model, interfaces, and user functionality.

  • Performs preventative and scheduled application upgrades, including API support, upgrades, patches, backup, and query log rotation.

FAST Professional Services

FAST Professional Services offers flexible engagements that range from advisory services to full turnkey deliverables. Our global team of more than 100 search engineers helps across the entire solution life cycle, from business strategy and solution design to application management and system health checks.

We work closely with customers to:

  • Define their strategic objectives, analyze the available opportunities fully, develop appropriate business cases, and lay out implementation maps.

  • Design effective search solutions, create detailed project plans, and identify key performance indicators (KPIs).

  • Implement search solutions that match the business objectives and fit with accepted quality assurance procedures.

  • Educate their staff on search best practices, from implementation to management.

  • Manage and host customers’ search applications actively.

  • Support customers with search management consulting.

  • Provide services that help them evaluate and improve on their search solutions.

Mini Case Study: FAST Professional Services Helps AutoTrader Scale with Its Business

AutoTrader.com is the Web’s top automobile classifieds marketplace. Customers’ expectations were growing at least as fast as the site itself. AutoTrader.com had to scale up faster and more nimbly—and become easier to run. The auto mart turned to FAST and was able to implement a winning solution in just four months. The FAST solution was integrated quickly into the existing Oracle technology: A cluster of 24 servers sits at each of AutoTrader.com’s data centers, peaking at 100–120 queries a second per server each day. The result? AutoTrader.com soon saw a surge in the number of listings that the site could display in response to a customer’s search—from 500 to 8,000. The solution opened up many new possibilities, among them, keyword searches on the site’s Research and Compare section, and low, high, and average prices for cars within a geographic area—two features that customers love.

FAST Search Business Consulting (FAST SBC)

For customers who share the Microsoft vision of business transformation through search, FAST SBC offers this premier consulting service designed specifically to help senior business leaders identify new, disruptive, search-driven opportunities and to define a clear execution road map to capitalize on them.

Each consulting engagement is customized to serve the client’s unique needs. Here is a quick sample of the services we offer:


Search overview

  • Review the FAST high-level product/technology road map.

  • Understand search and market trends impacting your business.

  • Examine opportunities relative to search-driven solutions.


Search benefit and road mapping

  • Identify new business opportunities leveraging search-driven solutions.

  • Align corporate strategy with market dynamics and business need.

  • Define objectives and criteria of each phase, and anchor search road map with corporate strategy and direction.


Search metrics

  • Define success criteria for implementation of FAST.

  • Define KPIs for measurement and continuous business improvement.

  • Success measurement framework.


Organizational planning

  • Analyze requirements and goals of the business.

  • Align project and operational requirements with company goals.

  • Develop organizational blueprint, including optimal organizational design/proposal.

FAST Technical Support

Our support centers are located strategically around the world and are available to deliver “follow-the-sun” support to our customers. High customer satisfaction is our number one priority. Support engineers are trained to assist with FAST product issues, understand your search application requirements, and provide effective resolutions to technical problems in a timely manner. You can select a support offering that best meets the needs of your organization and helps ensure the highest availability of your search application.

Standard Support is the basic support offering designed for customers with business hours support needs. It includes:

  • Software updates (patches and service packs) and upgrades to the latest major releases.

  • E-mail and Web-based ticket submission.

  • Regional business hours phone support.

  • 24x7 access to the FAST Knowledge Base.

  • Emergency issue-handling during business hours.

Premium Support is designed for global corporations with mission-critical support requirements. It’s the answer for applications for which downtime is not an option. Customers receive a special toll-free phone number to call to get immediate access to skilled engineers who are available around the clock, seven days a week, ready to handle emergency production outages.

Learn More About FAST Services

Need Support?

For FAST technical support, email us or call +1 866-922-5260 
(8 A.M. – 8 P.M. Eastern Time)

Read What Our Customers Have to Say

“We have licensed FAST to further develop our number one position as the leading online business service in Norway and to advance our global verticals online. The FAST SBC session clearly demonstrated the areas we could improve upon for not only our readers, but our advertisers, as well. FAST ESP represents a significant improvement compared to the previous search solution, both from an end-user perspective and from a business perspective. We will launch several new business initiatives with the use of FAST technology in the months to come.”
Gunnar Bjørkavåg, CEO, NHST Media Group

“FAST was the only provider that really understood our diverse search requirements and was fully committed to helping us achieve our goals.”
Richard Yeo, CTO, Fish4

For FAST Customers

Welcome FAST Customers

On April, 25, 2008, Microsoft completed its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer, opening a new chapter in enterprise search. By combining the innovation and agility of FAST with the discipline and resources of Microsoft, our customers get the best of both worlds: market-leading products from a trusted technology partner.

Today, Enterprise Search from Microsoft offers best-in-class technologies and cutting-edge innovations that fuel our vision of search: connecting people to information through engaging experiences that drive better results. Our compelling set of enterprise search offerings meets the varying needs of our customers, provides upgrade paths as those needs change, and inspires customers to incorporate search in innovative ways into their workplaces to drive revenue and power business results.

You can find information on all enterprise search products from Microsoft—including the advanced capabilities of best-in-breed FAST search—at www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch.


Visit these pages for more information:

Need Support?

For FAST technical support, email us or call +1 866-922-5260 
(8 A.M. – 8 P.M. Eastern Time)

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