San Francisco, United States
Fast Search & Transfer(TM) (OSEAX: FAST.OL) (FAST(TM)), the leading developer of search technologies, has announced a Technology Partnership with Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions. In addition, FAST will participate in the new Business Objects Open Search Initiative (OSI), which will provide organizations with unparalleled access to business intelligence data through a search-based access layer.
The combination of FAST Enterprise Search Platform(TM) (FAST ESP(TM)) and BusinessObjects(TM) XI Release 2 will provide functionality that will extend the use of BI systems more broadly throughout the enterprise, creating intelligence platforms that span the entire organization. FAST ESP together with BusinessObjects XI marries sophisticated search technology with powerful business intelligence to help knowledge workers quickly and easily find actionable information from reports, dashboards, scorecards and analysis, along with unstructured items including e-mails, note fields, and text files.
Adding New Context to Business Intelligence
Through the power of FAST's Contextual Insight(TM), this partnership will enable organizations to associate the metrics that the Business Objects system derives based on structured data analysis with relevant internal reports and memos, enabling users to quickly understand the history and cause of the metrics. FAST ESP analyzes and interprets the underlying meaning behind reports, not just the reports themselves, delivering "contextual BI" and allowing users to close the gap between insight and action. By joining structured information from databases with memos and documents, FAST can enhance predictive analytics, enabling users to view a broader dataset in a common structured format.
Search Uncovers New Sources of Insight
The analysis of unstructured information, entity and metadata extraction, and the subsequent matching, uniting and cleansing of diverse structured data repositories can provide new sources of insight and information for BI systems to report on. To access structured data repositories as part of the cleansing operation, BusinessObjects Data Integrator is integrated with the fuzzy matching available within FAST ESP. This unique combination of tools is currently used by several FAST customers in the publishing, telecommunications, financial services, and online directory markets.
"FAST brings unique experience and capabilities to the Business Objects Open Search Initiative, including innovations around data cleansing as part of our Adaptive Information Warehouse initiative. Enabling BI systems to analyze a wider range of data and information to provide context around metrics is a natural extension of those efforts," said Bjorn Olstad, CTO of FAST. "By leveraging the power of FAST ESP with Business Objects solutions to drive relevant information into the hands of the right users and present that information in context, joint customers will now have access to all the combined benefits of search technology and BI. This will allow them to boost productivity and improve the quality of decision making throughout the organization."
"Today's knowledge workers demand easy access to all of the information that is relevant to their role, regardless of format or location," said Wyatt Mullin, vice president of global ISV channels at Business Objects. "The combination of powerful business intelligence solutions from Business Objects and FAST's innovative search technology will enable companies to achieve their business goals through access to the full array of structured and unstructured data in their corporate systems."
About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company, with more than 39,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Business Objects helps organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize performance. The company's innovative business intelligence suite, BusinessObjects(TM) XI, offers the BI industry's most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes the award-winning Crystal line of reporting and data visualization software. Business Objects has also built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.
Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.
About FAST
FAST is the leading developer of search technologies that are behind the scenes at the world's best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST's flexible and scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP) elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FAST's solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Computer Associates, Dell, EMC Documentum, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Merrill Lynch, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia) and Vodafone.
FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East and Africa. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.
(C) 2006 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer, FAST, FAST ESP, Contextual Insight and the FAST logo are trademarks of Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved. The Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Intelligent Question, and Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT: FAST Brian Greehan 781-418-2414 fast@daviesmurphy.com or Carine Zeier +47 23 01 12 00 (Europe) pr@fastsearch.com
Source: Business Wire (Business Wire India)