Microsoft's announcement that it is intending on acquiring FAST last week is certainly the first major shot fired in the enterprise search battle that could ensue among the software giants. However it is not so much enterprise search that interests me in this context but the investment that a vendor like FAST had made in pursuing the BI market. There is no doubt that Search and BI are going to be hot in 2008. Expect much more activity in this area in 2008 as these two exciting areas of technology increasingly collide. I will be reasearching the state of this emerging Search and BI market and will feed back to the B-Eye-Network later in 2H08 on it. Meanwhile it will be interesting to watch vendors like Autonomy , Endeca and even Google and their relationships with the software giants to see where this leads.