Microsoft Development Center Norway

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FAST, a Microsoft Subsidiary

Industry	Information Technology
Founded	July 16, 1997; 27 years ago (1997-07-16)
Fate	Acquired by Microsoft
Headquarters	Oslo, Norway
Area served	Global
Key people	John M. Lervik (Former CEO), Bjørn Olstad (CTO)
Products	Search engines, enterprise search, information access, knowledge management
Number of employees	750
Parent	Microsoft
Website	www.fastsearch.com

Microsoft Development Center Norway (known as FAST (Fast Search & Transfer ASA) before 2010^[1]) is a Norwegian company, founded in 1997 and based in Oslo, with offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. FAST focused on data search technologies.

On April 24, 2008, Microsoft acquired FAST, which is now known as Microsoft Development Center Norway.

FAST offered an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production of searchable indexes. It provided a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offered a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company was developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine.