Microsoft Development Center Norway (known as Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) before 2010) is a Norwegian company, founded in 1997 and based in Oslo. FAST focused on data search technologies. It had offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. On April 24, 2008, Microsoft acquired FAST, which became 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. Technology Products FAST delivers real-time search and business intelligence products, and currently has about 3,600 implementations. They offer a core search platform, FAST ESP, and develop roducts on top of the platform. FAST's products are used in three areas; external (online and mobile), internal (information access and discovery) and OEM (embedded in other vendor's products. Some examples of their applications were: FAST AdMomentum for online advertising FAST Data Cleansing for cleansing multiple structured data repositories FAST ImPulse for eCommerce and online catalogues FAST Radar for dashboarding and business intelligence Technology ownership FAST used complementary technologies from BBN Technologies for speech recognition and Stellent (now part of Oracle) for the conversion of different file formats. In 2007, FAST was sued by a company which claims FAST, as well as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major web companies, stole its technology. Research projects Information Access Disruptions Information Access Disruptions (iAD) is a research centre funded by the Research Council of Norway and the centre's partners. FAST was the host institution and the research centre manager was Bjørn Olstad, adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Chief Technology Officer of FAST. iAd sought to identify opportunities and develop the next-generation search engines that could extract user-friendly information from vast and complex amounts of data. iAd also facilitated interaction between international content and technology suppliers. Norwegian partners were the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the University of Oslo, the University of Tromsø, the Norwegian