Ali I. Riaz, president and chief financial officer of FAST, remarked, "FAST signed on a record number of new customers during the quarter, and broadened a record number of existing relationships with follow-on sales." FAST's year-to-date results showed top-line growth of 67%, with EBITDA growing by 72%, and the EBITDA-to-revenue margin pushing upward from 24% to 25%. Riaz added: "Strategically, our platform (FAST ESP) and search-derivative applications (SDAs) built on FAST ESP continue to deliver unprecedented value to our customers. Further, FAST is the safest bet in the market with its strong financial growth, debt-free balance sheet, high esteem amongst industry analysts, and leading-edge products proven by customer endorsements. Our top-rated consulting, hosting, and delivery services make FAST an ideal strategic technology partner. As a result, our customer loyalty is the best in the industry: 100% customer retention, 98% customer satisfaction. FAST continues to close the highest average deal size in the search business."
FAST's new and expanded customer roster in Q3 spanned every continent and key business sector, including ecommerce, education, financial services, government, internet search, media, publishing, retail, software development, and telecommunications. These new and extended customers demonstrate significant traction in all three of FAST's business sectors: eBusiness, Knowledge Enablement and Application Enablement. The company closed a record number of new customer deals in Q3 2005.
New or extended eBusiness customers for Q3 included Accoona, Babelstore SA/PriceMinister, Iconoculture, Schibsted Sok AS, Softbank, Stuller, Vodafone and World Directories, among others. The FAST eBusiness product suite offers a range of applications from site search to mission-critical advanced online solutions. FAST also made strong headway in multimedia search, signing major agreements with four leading global brands to power search of rich media assets and data.
In FAST's Knowledge Enablement sector, new and extended customer relationships included Fidelity Investments, FirstGov, Nottingham Trent University, Renew Data, United Parcel Service (UPS), U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others.
New Application Enablement (OEM) relationships were signed in Q3 with customers building their software solutions on top of FAST InStreamTM, including, Integrated Knowledge Dynamics, LexisNexis Applied Discovery, Messaging Architects, and nMatrix among others.
FAST continued to strengthen its indirect channel offerings by partnering with a wide array of ISVs and system integrators around the globe, and in multiple application areas including: brand protection, content management, email compliance, legal discovery, library sciences and storage/archiving. The richness of the InStream feature set and breadth of platform support continues to win over ISVs that use search as a competitive differentiator and productivity enhancement. FAST also extended its relationship with LexisNexis by adding an OEM relationship with Applied Discovery, and strengthened existing OEM relationships with Computer Associates and Chordiant Software. "Our Q3 marked the one year anniversary of the introduction of FAST InStream, our OEM enterprise search solution developed specifically to meet the complex application-based search requirements of independent software vendors. We have seen remarkable success over the past year, and that momentum increased in Q3. Scores of organizations have selected FAST as their search technology partner - clearly demonstrating confidence in our company, and in the strength of our technology platform for addressing a broad range of content and business applications," stated Riaz.
FAST has entered into a Joint Venture with Sensis Pty Ltd, the leading Australian directories company, and Schibsted Sok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Schibsted, a leading media group in the Nordic region. The Joint Venture Company will be located in London with a separate management team focused on delivering state-of-the-art search and online advertisement solutions to online directories and media companies. FAST's involvement in the Joint Venture includes a minority equity investment as well as delivery of software licenses and ancillary services. FAST owns 19% of the Joint Venture.
The FAST Search Best PracticesTM (FAST SBPTM) strategic consulting services continued to help a growing number of organizations exploit the full potential of search. In Q3 more than 30 workshops were conducted for FAST's major prospects and existing customers, supporting their search investment from initial concepts through deployment and expansion throughout the organization. SBP workshops execute a focused analysis of customer's current search context, providing a series of structured recommendations to optimize their use of search technology, and prioritize existing and future projects. SBP consulting workshops were also delivered in conjunction with FAST's SI partners, including Accenture, IBM and Tieto Enator, enabling them to provide best-in-class search consulting at technical, functional and strategic levels. "The uniqueness of SBP consulting lies in its combination of short-term recommendations for search implementation with a long-term vision in ways that intelligent search can redefine enterprise business processes," commented FAST chief technology officer Bjorn Olstad.
A number of significant milestones were reached by our customers in Q3 as more than forty projects went live. Included among these projects is Scirus, Reed Elsevier's award-winning scientific web search engine. Reed Elsevier further enhanced their users' experience by leveraging FAST's expertise in advanced search technology and relevancy ranking, enabling Scirus to deliver extremely precise search results with lightning speed. MediaNews Group uses FAST technology to increase their customer search experiences for many of their media properties, including major news organizations such as The Denver Post and the San Francisco Bay papers. WeightWatchers.com applied FAST advanced search and navigation capabilities to deliver health, food and fitness information more easily to all site visitors. This powerful search function, combined with a scientific approach people trust and the best weight-loss tools on the Internet, continue to make WeightWatchers.com the leading subscription-based weight-loss site on the Web.
-- FAST furthered development of the FAST Personal Search Platform in advance of an expected product announcement early in Q4. FAST PSP extends FAST's search technology to a flexible platform that enables partners and their enterprise customers to make every desktop computer a search hub unifying the desktop, enterprise and Web.
"We have made solid progress during the year, including meeting our technology, customer acquisition, partner relations, and financial objectives," commented Lervik. "With an increasing number of technology capabilities and market driven offerings, FAST has the most complete vision and a demonstrated ability to execute on our strategy. The demand for business transformation based on Search has just begun, and we intend to take a leadership role in this development. We are on track to deliver another record year for FAST in 2005. The progress and investments during 2005 also represent a sound foundation for 2006 and beyond."
FAST creates the real-time search and filtering solutions that are behind the scenes at the world's best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST's flexible and scalable integrated technology platform 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 powerful enterprise search technology solutions are used by more than 1,500 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), AT&T, Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, FirstGov.gov (GSA), 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 .
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