Getting your player ready...
SEATTLE — Microsoft said Tuesday it will buy Fast Search & Transfer of Oslo, Norway, for $1.2 billion as it aims to shore up its search technology for businesses against competition from Oracle and IBM.
Its cash offer of $2.97 a share for Fast represented a 42 percent premium over the stock’s Jan. 4 closing price.
Fast is one of the biggest enterprise search players. Its technology helps workers inside a business locate data kept in a tangle of different types of files and databases.
It could, for example, find benefits info posted on a company intranet or a 5- year-old annual report buried on a file server.
The Associated Press
