Shake-Up at Microsoft FAST

Wow, this is quite a week for news in the enterprise search industry! Yesterday, I woke up to hear that Autonomy is acquiring Interwoven; today, I hear from CMS Watch analyst Adriaan Bloem that FAST CEO  John Lervik is resigning, with their CTO Bjørn Olstad stepping in to fill his duties.

FAST had some accounting issues that came out shorty after Microsoft acquired them last year, and it’s possible that Microsoft is simply clearing the deck of anyone associated with those issues. I’m just an innocent bystander, and my pedestrian concern is whether Bjørn’s new duties will prevent him from participating in a panel I’m organizing at SIGIR.