Draper, Utah – Sept. 1, 2004 – NextPage® Inc. today announced that Fast Search & Transfer™ (FAST™) (OSE: FAST), the leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, has signed a definitive agreement to purchase the technology, product lines, and the over 500 customers and partners of NextPage’s publishing applications business unit, including NXT®, Folio®, LivePublish™ and GetSmart™. NextPage’s document management services, Chrome™, will remain with the company.
"The sale of this business unit enables us to focus all of our resources on the tremendous growth opportunities for our Chrome offering,” said Darren Lee, chief executive officer of NextPage. “We’ve been successful in developing profitable, best-in-class publishing applications. This acquisition validates the value of our work. FAST is a strong company, ideally positioned to integrate world-class search with our leading publishing applications for the benefit of our customers and partners.”
FAST has transformed enterprise search from a powerful, yet narrowly perceived function, into an IT infrastructure necessity and a key enabler for mission-critical applications. Rather than requiring totally separate development efforts and implementation, FAST’s Search Derivative Applications (SDAs) can be rapidly developed based on the flexible framework of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP™). This focused flexibility results in very efficient use of development and support resources, and of investments in physical equipment.
“NextPage’s publishing applications complement our enterprise search platform extremely well,” said John M. Lervik, FAST’s chief executive officer. “With the addition of these product lines, FAST can further accelerate our development of search derivative applications (SDAs) for the publishing industry, increase our global market presence, and expand our enterprise search focus. In addition, the integration of NextPage’s technology with FAST ESP will enable FAST to offer publishers the most advanced solutions for searching, retrieving, managing and distributing their business-critical content.”
Chrome is the first and only document management service that tracks versions of documents across e-mail, servers and hard drives – both on and offline. Its usage centers on departments and users whose products are documents. NextPage has been developing these services for the last 18 months with critical input and direction from its customers. The company currently has more than 50 customers piloting Chrome and anticipates launching later this year.
Seven Hills Partners, LLC of San Francisco acted as exclusive financial advisor to NextPage in this transaction.
About FAST
FAST creates the real-time search and filter technology 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 a wide range of global customers and partners, including AT&T, Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, FirstGov.gov (GSA), IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, 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, and Japan. Additionally, the FAST Group has business partners and customers in a number of other locations, such as Brazil, Canada and Australia. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.
About NextPage
NextPage Document Management Services deliver the first ever solution for tracking documents across e-mail, hard drives and servers, on or offline. With NextPage, users end the document chaos that takes place whenever people try to coordinate and edit several versions of the same document. Teams and organizations rely on NextPage to reduce the risk of the wrong documents being edited, reviewed or made available. Since NextPage was established in July 1999, the company has been building profitable document applications. These solutions have been implemented by companies such as ABN AMRO Bank, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Deloitte & Touche, Wolters Kluwer and Reed Elsevier. For more information, visit www.nextpage.com or call 800-NEXTPAGE or 801-748-4400.
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NextPage is a registered trademark, and Chrome is a trademark of NextPage Inc. All other names are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Contact:
Mark Fredrickson
NextPage Inc.
801-748-4443
pr@nextpage.com
