Highlights:

* Q1 revenues of $32.8m; grew by 5% quarter on quarter and 54% year on year
o Growth driven by continuous adoption of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP™), Search Derivative Applications (SDAs), and OEM enterprise search solutions from both new customers and the expansion of existing relationships
* Adjusted EBITDA of $8.5m in Q1; reached 26% of revenues
o $6.1m in Q1 EBIT & $6.2m in Q1 operating income; both reached 19% of revenues
* Quarter end cash balances solid at $271m; increased by $146m
o Cash received from customers reached $30m
o Shares placed yielded net proceeds of $158m
* Record number of customer wins in Q1, including key wins in eBusiness, Knowledge Enablement and Application Enablement; spanning e-commerce, education, financial services, government, Internet portals, media, publishing, retail, software development, and telecommunications.
* New or extended customer relationships include AFIP, ALAS, Betronic, BilBasen, Den Blе Avis, CyberMap, DaimlerChrysler, Fonecta Ltd., Insider Pages, John Fairfax, Merck, Merrill Lynch, Live Nation, Oodle, Orkla Media, Siemens, Recruit Automotive, RCS MediaGroup, and Via Appia Informatica, among others.
* New reseller, OEM and alliance partnership agreements with Avamar, Ecometry/Blue Martini, Mimosa Systems, Stellent, and Symantec, among others.
* Product announcements included the release of the next generation of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP™ ): FAST ESP 5; and FAST ImPulse™ 3.0, the next generation of FAST’s eCommerce solution for online retailers.

Financial Performance
Commenting on the Company’s results, Dr. John M. Lervik, chief executive officer of FAST, said, “In Q1 FAST drove revenues near the $33 million mark to deliver yet another record quarterly result. I attribute our strong momentum to continued strong execution, rapid innovation, and our focus on customer satisfaction. FAST continues to lead the adoption of search technology throughout the enterprise, from traditional uses of search that replace or displace current solutions, to game-changing applications that break into new markets, enable new lines of business, or outflank competitors. In particular, I am pleased with the rapid acceleration of strategic implementations of FAST solutions by our customers and partners that are setting new standards of search innovation.”

Ali I. Riaz, president and chief financial officer of FAST, remarked, “With our continued accelerated growth and financial strength during Q1, FAST remains ahead of our competitors. We continued to sign new, market-leading customers and partners and expanded our relationships with our installed base. Our record revenues of $32.8 million represent a 5% increase over the previous record set in Q4 of 2005, and a 54% increase over Q1 2005.” Riaz added: “Our adjusted EBITDA of $8.5m, increased by nearly 12% over last quarter and by 60% over Q1 last year. Our debt-free balance sheet included a quarter-end cash balance of over $271 million. This cash balance reflects an increase of $158 million in cash received from our successful placement of FAST shares.” Riaz went on to add: “In terms of other metrics of our performance in Q1: FAST was named by KMWorld magazine as one of the 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management; FAST continues to enjoy unrivalled status from industry analysts; FAST continues our streak of 100% customer retention; our deal sizes remain the highest in the industry; and our partner community continues its rapid expansion. The market validates our technology and service leadership.”

New Customers
FAST’s new and expanded customer roster in Q1 spanned every continent and key business sector, demonstrating significant traction in all three of FAST’s business sectors: eBusiness, Knowledge Enablement and Application Enablement (OEM). Markets gaining momentum included financial services, eCommerce, retail, publishing, energy, government, and telecommunications; new market penetration in pharmaceuticals with Merck, a global research-driven market leader, and in Web advertising with Oodle, the search engine for local classifieds. Investments to support our international expansion generated high returns with new customers, including AFIP, Via Appia Informatica, BilBasen, CyberMap, and Den Blе Avis.

New or extended eBusiness customers for Q1 included RCS MediaGroup, Live Nation, and Recruit Automotive, among others. In FAST’s Knowledge Enablement sector, new and extended customer relationships included ALAS (Attorney’s Liability Assurance Society), John Fairfax, Betronic, Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, Merrill Lynch, among others. New Application Enablement (OEM) relationships were signed in Q1 with customers building their software solutions on top of FAST InStream™, in addition to Symantec, agreements were also entered into with Avamar, Ecometry/Blue Martini, Mimosa Systems, and Stellent, to name a few.

Customer Milestones
In the first quarter of 2006, FAST reached major key milestones spanning all continents and key sectors. More than 50 projects went live with FAST’s direct involvement, and many more were delivered by FAST’s certified partners. CitySearch, a U.S. local search service, went into production offering its unique Local Pay For Performance (PFP) service. Reed Business applied FAST’s advanced search capabilities to enhance both www.kellysearch.com, the Internet’s cutting edge business resource and www.zibb.com, a global business search site. Iconoculture, a trailblazer in consumer research and advisory services, built their solution on FAST ESP. Herold, an Austrian Directory Services Company went into production with a new local search application based on the latest FAST solution. In the UK, Cancer Research went live with FAST.

Strategic Partnerships
Strategic partnerships continued the upward surge into Q1 as alliance partnerships signed in 2005 increased their levels of business, and the FAST OEM team signed significant new vendors. Regional alliance partners including Comperio, InfoSolutions, and TietoEnator, and key system integrators such as Accenture and Search Technologies, continued to deliver new business and FAST implementations to customers around the world. FAST System Integrator and OEM Partners benefited from the FAST Search Best Practices™ (FAST SBP™) organization with more than 100 dedicated search consultants trained to date.

Our partnership growth was attributed to strong demand for industry leading search solutions across a variety of software market segments, including content management, storage and email management.

“Our Q1 results reflected the continued trend of increased indirect channel revenue and influence, built on the increased demand by our partners’ customers for the breadth of functionality that FAST search solutions enable,” stated Riaz. “FAST continues to attract leading software and service vendors to join our FAST X10 partner program. FAST X10 helps organizations grow their revenues by adding new revenue models, increasing efficiencies and strengthening application performance. FAST X10 offers a strong partner support infrastructure for sales and marketing activities, extensive training through our FAST University, and hands-on practical guidance through the FAST Professional Services Group,” added Riaz.

Consulting Services
The demand for FAST Search Best Practices strategic consulting service has exceeded expectations: the group has delivered more than 60 workshops across the world in Q1. More than 20 have been significant engagements with deliverables that include custom business plans, project plans, and usability reviews of FAST customer's search solutions.

“With a total of close to 200 workshops delivered to-date, FAST's SBP team has created a unique body of search knowledge and a methodology to share the generics, ensuring optimal use of search for its customer base,” commented FAST chief technology officer, Bjorn Olstad. “More than half of these workshops have been completed with Fortune 1000 companies covering diverse sectors and are attributed with having analyzed and documented search application patterns in a broad set of large applications.”

In the past quarter, the Search Best Practices group published 20 vendor-independent whitepapers and The Book of Search, the industry’s first book detailing the business and technical applications of enterprise search. During Q1, more than 4,300 copies have been delivered to customers and partners.

FAST Innovation
“Q1 2006 was another landmark quarter for FAST. We kicked off the quarter with FASTforward ’06, our first business and technology conference. By our customers’ metrics, the event was a great success with close to 600 CEOs, CTOs and senior IT and business professionals participating,” Olstad stated. “The audience represented 66 FAST partners and over 270 companies from 28 countries around the world. The conference featured a world-class lineup of industry luminaries and customers showcasing enterprise search innovation. The event served as a launch venue for the release of FAST ESP 5, with Contextual InsightTM and Search Business Center functionality. FAST ESP 5’s capabilities were commended and FAST once again raised the bar in the Enterprise Search industry.”

The response to FAST ESP 5 from industry analysts and customers endorsed our technology leadership. Rigorous testing through key beta customers and the extremely positive reaction from FAST’s global user community at FASTforward ’06 have validated FAST ESP’s three innovation goals of redefining search precision, information access and IT infrastructure through its new concept of Contextual Search. With the introduction of its new Search Business Center, a central non-technically focused graphic portal for the management of the complete FAST search experience, FAST ESP has also introduced a breakthrough innovation in search workflow, user interaction and ease of use.

FAST furthered its push into new markets with innovative solutions in mobile computing, data warehousing, linguistic data cleansing, “Triple Play” media management, threat detection, and litigation protection. FAST intensified its lead in scalability by doubling both indexing and processing performance, decreasing indexing latency by half, increasing density per machine by over 500 percent.

Q2 2006 Business Focus
“In Q2, we continue focusing on relationships with innovative, industry leading customers and partners. Search has clearly become a strategic, mission critical application. We are pleased to see that top level executives are realizing the breadth and depth of areas FAST solutions can address,” Lervik commented. “We are also focusing on hiring talented professionals to support our continued rapid growth. We are expanding our teams around the globe to continue delivering the quality products and services our customers expect. In Q2 we will open new offices in Seoul and Hong Kong, strengthening our presence in these important markets,” Lervik added.
About FAST
FAST is the leading developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions that are behind the scenes at the world’s best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST’s flexible and scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP) elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FAST’s solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo.

FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

Source: FAST

Source: Wired News