A lot of Microsoft talk around here lately…but I think one of its most interesting moves of late was its acquisition deal for Fast Search and Transfer. At the 451 Group, we saw a lot of potential upside to a deeper marriage between traditional applications and search and categorization tools. And to be honest, I haven’t seen much action in this department.

It makes a lot of sense to marry search, text analytics and core CRM and ERP applications. Think about it - how many times have you been inside an enterprise application and been more than frustrated with the time and steps needed to find the right information. The joke has always been that employees can find data on the public internet faster than inside their own companies - this could help solve that issue once and for all.

And as web 2.0 and other trends exponentially increase the types of data as well as the volume of information inside CRM systems, truly functional search will become even more important.

I see Microsoft as potentially using the Fast deal as way to work against Google and other more traditional search companies…but I would be more worried if the Fast technology was injected into its everyday applications and its Dynamics business line. There’s a lot of potential there.