FAST and Business Objects Team to Deliver Contextual Business Intelligence

Fast Search & Transfer(TM) (OSEAX: FAST.OL) (FAST(TM)), the
leading developer of search technologies, today announced a Technology
Partnership with Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ), the world's leading
provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions. In addition, FAST
will participate in the new Business Objects Open Search Initiative
(OSI), which will provide organizations with unparalleled access to
business intelligence data through a search-based access layer.

The combination of FAST Enterprise Search Platform(TM) (FAST
ESP(TM)) and BusinessObjects(TM) XI Release 2 will provide
functionality that will extend the use of BI systems more broadly
throughout the enterprise, creating intelligence platforms that span
the entire organization. FAST ESP together with BusinessObjects XI
marries sophisticated search technology with powerful business
intelligence to help knowledge workers quickly and easily find
actionable information from reports, dashboards, scorecards and
analysis, along with unstructured items including e-mails, note
fields, and text files.

Adding New Context to Business Intelligence

Through the power of FAST's Contextual Insight(TM), this
partnership will enable organizations to associate the metrics that
the Business Objects system derives based on structured data analysis
with relevant internal reports and memos, enabling users to quickly
understand the history and cause of the metrics. FAST ESP analyzes and
interprets the underlying meaning behind reports, not just the reports
themselves, delivering "contextual BI" and allowing users to close the
gap between insight and action. By joining structured information from
databases with memos and documents, FAST can enhance predictive
analytics, enabling users to view a broader dataset in a common
structured format.

Search Uncovers New Sources of Insight

The analysis of unstructured information, entity and metadata
extraction, and the subsequent matching, uniting and cleansing of
diverse structured data repositories can provide new sources of
insight and information for BI systems to report on. To access
structured data repositories as part of the cleansing operation,
BusinessObjects Data Integrator is integrated with the fuzzy matching
available within FAST ESP. This unique combination of tools is
currently used by several FAST customers in the publishing,
telecommunications, financial services, and online directory markets.

"FAST brings unique experience and capabilities to the Business
Objects Open Search Initiative, including innovations around data
cleansing as part of our Adaptive Information Warehouse initiative.
Enabling BI systems to analyze a wider range of data and information
to provide context around metrics is a natural extension of those
efforts," said Bjorn Olstad, CTO of FAST. "By leveraging the power of
FAST ESP with Business Objects solutions to drive relevant information
into the hands of the right users and present that information in
context, joint customers will now have access to all the combined
benefits of search technology and BI. This will allow them to boost
productivity and improve the quality of decision making throughout the
organization."

"Today's knowledge workers demand easy access to all of the
information that is relevant to their role, regardless of format or
location," said Wyatt Mullin, vice president of global ISV channels at
Business Objects. "The combination of powerful business intelligence
solutions from Business Objects and FAST's innovative search
technology will enable companies to achieve their business goals
through access to the full array of structured and unstructured data
in their corporate systems."

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI)
software company, with more than 39,000 customers worldwide, including
over 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Business Objects helps
organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision
making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize
performance. The company's innovative business intelligence suite,
BusinessObjects(TM) XI, offers the BI industry's most advanced and
complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting,
query and analysis, and enterprise information management.
BusinessObjects XI includes the award-winning Crystal line of
reporting and data visualization software. Business Objects has also
built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and
offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively
deploy their business intelligence projects.

Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and
Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ)
and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More
information about Business Objects can be found at
www.businessobjects.com.

About FAST

FAST is the leading developer of search technologies 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, Computer Associates, Dell, EMC Documentum,
Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder,
LexisNexis, Merrill Lynch, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis,
Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US
Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia) and Vodafone.

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 and Africa. For
further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

(C) 2006 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer,
FAST, FAST ESP, Contextual Insight and the FAST logo are trademarks of
Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved. The Business Objects
logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Intelligent Question, and
Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects
in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned
herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.