Microsoft announced today that they have made an offer to acquire enterprise search solution provider FAST for $1.2 billion. This represents a significant move in a market the Redmond software giant has traditionally ignored and the consensus opinion so far seems to be that it signals a new battleground in the company's war with Google.

This is not a bad move for Microsoft to make, particularly in light of their "Software+Services" philosophy where much of the information in a corporation will remain on corporate servers. Google's more conventional SaaS approach puts the data on Google's backend, and therefore accessible to their highly developed indexing and searching technologies by default. Indeed, the "search as a filesystem" paradigm is fairly well ingrained into Google's SaaS offerings, whereas Microsoft continues to be saddled with the older files and folders paradigm and has had notable trouble with search in their filesystem. Integration of FAST technologies with Microsoft Software+Service staples such as Sharepoint Server might go a long way to reducing Google's tremendous lead in search-oriented filing systems.

Dana Gardner reads this as a move more oriented toward taking on IBM and has some fun pointing out Microsoft's belated initiative and their need to go outside the company for sufficient expertise ("I guess all that Microsoft R&D wasn't enough to apply to such an inevitable market need either." Take that and stuff it in your Microsoft Research inbox, Bill!). However, to quote Bill's wisdom right after making fun of him, "In the computer industry the person who does something first and the person who does it successfully, they are rarely the same...." Microsoft has had no little success waiting until the last minute and buying up the technology they need, so it seems to be a working strategy even if they hate to admit it. I doubt that IBM is in their sights on this one; Mary Jo points out the likelihood that this acquisition will bolster Sharepoint Server, which is right on the front line of the SaaS/Software+Services shootout.