Enterprise search gains analytic edge

Enterprise search vendor Fast has launched version 5.0 of its ESP search tool, designed to return faster, more accurate results.

Fast ESP 5.0 features new Contextual Insight technology, which combines information analysis and retrieval tools to return results that are more relevant to users’ requirements, according to the company’s chief executive, John Lervik.

“[With most search tools] you have to read through the results and analyse them yourself to extract any meaning, but we can do that analysis on the fly,” said Lervik. “If you search Google you will get relevant results but not necessarily the right ones – we’ve taken search from being approximately good to exact.”

The suite’s Search Business Center provides an intuitive user interface that will enable IT administrators to configure the product to the specific demands of their organisation, Fast said.

“Search [tools] either focus on one particular niche – email search or knowledge management search, for example – or they are very generic and hard to employ,” Lervik said. “But we say search can do anything and we’ll provide the best practices for individual companies to implement it.”

ESP 5.0 is also vendor neutral, supporting all major platforms and operating systems, and provides a robust, scalable system allowing firms to search vast amounts of data, said Fast.

“Some organisations have over 5,000 terabytes of data, which they need to search and analyse in seconds,” said Lervik. “Search is becoming mission-critical. Before, if it went down for a few minutes it didn’t matter, but now [it does].”