Microsoft (MSFT) has offered $1.23 billion for Fast Search & Transfer ASA, based in Norway. It's a company that offers software products which aid a company in managing, searching and storing their data.
The price is a 42 percent premium over where Fast Search closed on January 4.
It looks like there'll be little if any opposition to the deal, as 37 percent of Fast Search's sharholders have already approved the deal, and the entire board of the company backs the deal.
Even though approval is assured, it doesn't eliminate the possibility a competitor will possibly make a bid for the company. If not, the deal will close sometime in the second quarter of 2008.
Charles Di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, said he liked the deal.
``This is an area of search where there's no clear winner, so this is a way for Microsoft to hit competitors where they ain't," said Di Bona. "You're seeing Microsoft push into this area hard, and it's very complementary to what they do in server software and search.''
He's referring to Sharepoint, which when measured by sales, is the fastest-growing software product in the history of Microsoft.
While Sharepoint does more than search across business networks, it's one of the major reasons companies buy the product in the first place, making the deal with Fast Search extremely important. Microsoft said without the search feature, data in a company is harder to find than it is on the Internet.
Even with the embracing of Sharepoint by businesses, Fast Search is even better in relationship to their search products that Sharepoint is, and this will give Microsoft an even better positioning in the competitive intranet search market. They are positioned through their Office and Windows software to increase the demand for the product.
AS of June 30, 2007, Microsoft had sales of over $800 million for Office SharePoint.
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