Search market - Racing ahead in the fast lane. With things hotting up in the global enterprise search market, Mark Chillingworth braves heavy snow and temperatures of -11C to visit Fast's headquarters in Oslo and grill senior management on current developments.(Fast Search and Transfer ASA)

Over the past three years, plucky Norwegian upstart Fast Search & Transfer has been building up a profile as a big beast in the enterprise search market.

IT analyst Gartner Group ranked the company as a leader in its report on information access technology in October 2005, putting it alongside Autonomy, Verity and Endeca as a pace-setter in the sector. Verity has since been consumed by the rapidly growing British supplier Autonomy.

In their report, the Gartner analysts say that Fast "has cornered a substantial portion of the market for information access technology".

Rob Lancaster at Yankee Group, a US-based provider of IT market information, agrees with Gartner's take. "Fast's strategy to deliver a comprehensive platform in the form of packages tailored to business needs is the right approach to enterprise search," he says.

Fast's client list is also impressive, with long-term relationships with STM behemoth Reed Elsevier and news provider Reuters.

So how did Fast get into such a cut-throat and difficult market in the first place? Co-founder and CEO John Marcus Lervik was looking at developing a video search engine back in 1997, which was probably nine years too early given that this technology is all the rage at present.

Studying digital signal processing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Lervik and initial business partner Espen Brandin formed the company and developed the foundations of today's Fast Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). "We tried to sell enterprise search in Norway, but the market is too small, so in 1998 we went to Boston," Lervik says. "In 97 and 98 we saw that search technology could be used across thousands of applications."