FAST signs joint sales and marketing agreement with Sakhr Software Co.

Through this agreement, Sakhr will become a FAST reseller enabling FAST to increase its market presence in the Arab speaking world.

In addition, FAST will license and integrate Arabic advanced linguistic analysis tools from Sakhr into FAST ESP™, FAST's highly scalable enterprise search platform. With this integration, FAST further expands the capabilities of FAST ESP to intelligently and dynamically retrieve and analyze the complete collection of relevant Arabic information across an organization's enterprise and the Web, regardless of the format, structure, or location of the data.

"Sakhr Software is the world leader in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Our vision is to enable Arabic IT by providing our own world class solutions, and by embedding our core technologies within global IT solutions in order to adapt them to the Arabic language," stated Salah Malaeb, General Manager of Sakhr. "Our agreement with FAST reconfirms Sakhr's approach to widening its scope of international alliances, where our advanced Arabic technologies provide large international IT companies, such as FAST, with the unique opportunity to boost their position as global platform providers, bringing advanced data analysis capabilities to the Arabic language, which we believe will be of interest to our customers."

"FAST ESP is the first enterprise search platform to revolutionize the way organizations draw one complete, accurate and intelligent view of all of their information existing across their enterprise and from the Web," commented Ali I. Riaz, FAST's chief operating officer. "FAST has established a reputation as the enterprise search leader in providing linguistics and language support for 77 languages. Through this agreement with Sakhr Software, FAST is integrating some of the best Arabic linguistics technology available, and will take full advantage of Sakhr's solid business relationships to propel FAST's presence in the Arab world."

Running on low-cost, high performance servers, the precision-engineered FAST ESP enables organizations to efficiently gain a 360-degree view of relevant structured data stored in databases, as well as the unstructured data of documents, emails, presentations, Web pages, and more. Whether data exists in multiple databases and applications, on corporate intranets, or on the Web, FAST ESP provides unlimited access and scalability in data volume, number of users, and freshness of data. It also enables organizations to draw one complete, accurate, secure, and intelligent view of all the information they need to advance the fortunes of the enterprise.

FAST ESP is offered though the FAST Data Search™ suite of enterprise search solutions, which includes FAST Data Search for Site Search™; FAST Data Search for Compliance™; FAST Data Search for eCommerce™; FAST Data Search for Intranets™; and FAST Data Search 360™. The FAST Data Search product suite supplies a complete information retrieval solution ideal for key vertical markets and applications including e-Commerce and Internet Portals, Financial Services; Government; Life Sciences; Media and Publishing; and Telecom.