Of course, with last year's upheaval at Fast Search & Transfer, there has been speculation of the company being acquired. And most were quick to agree that Microsoft would be a likely buyer: when FAST and Microsoft announced they were "working together" on integrating FAST ESP with MOSS 2007, it set off a lot of trading of shares in Oslo.

At CMS Watch, we were skeptical: Microsoft had been working very hard on improving the search capabilities in SharePoint. As we described in the Enterprise Search Report 2008, the company seemed to finally get their act together. Redmond clearly had its search products much more coherently aligned than, say, IBM's confusingly vast array of solutions. There was standardization of the technology: both MOSS and Vista's embedded search, for instance, are using IFilters to convert source documents (which is especially ambitious, since most other vendors use either Oracle's or Autonomy's filters). The success of their effort even drove the first of the third party vendors specializing in improving on SharePoint search over the cliff. Clearly, Microsoft had invested a lot and was starting to reap the benefits. Why would they acquire a Norwegian competitor hiding in the fjords?

Well, we were wrong -- but at least we were right. Sounds paradoxical? It should. To quote myself: "The irony is that MOSS Search is not a slam dunk. There is room for alternatives, even in Microsoft-oriented enterprises." Microsoft itself would seem to have agreed; isn't it ironic?

Microsoft is offering $1.2 billion for FAST (a 42 percent premium over the current market cap). Though they can certainly afford it, it's a bit outside of the "$50M to $200M sweetspot" Microsoft mentioned two years ago. Their explanation of reasons for an acquisition is probably still valid though: FAST brings people, technology, time to market, and potentially new markets. FAST would certainly come with the engineering teams and technology, and Microsoft may want to pick up the pace on conquering the market, since ESP would allow them to get into the complex, multi-repository enterprise search scenarios that MOSS isn't really ready to address.

What will be interesting to see is how ESP will be integrated in the product portfolio. Will bits and pieces start showing up in Windows Server and SharePoint, or will this year bring us Microsoft Enterprise Search 2010? Unfortunately, we already drained our crystal ball for the predictions for this year, but clearly, enterprise search is not dead. It's a nice idea that Microsoft would acquire anything Fast; whether the transition is going to be quick, as well, is another matter. Not every fast break leads to a slam dunk. I wouldn't be placing my bets with Redmond, just yet.