Globally distributed organizations often struggle with unifying information across the boundaries of country borders or their IT infrastructure. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as privacy concerns, contractual obligations with customers, bandwidth constraints, or simply lack of IT agreement for a centralized search deployment. Simply put, in some cases you just cannot index the content at remote locations. So if you can't index it, what do you do? The answer: Federate it.

Federated Search enables secure, search-based access to information across an organization regardless of its location, without it being indexed remotely.

The Longitude Federator is the ideal solution for distributed organizations that cannot deploy search centrally and must deploy search at several different locations. The Longitude Federator is the only federation tool in the marketplace that unifies the search results from multiple SharePoint Search, FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST ESP servers into a single unified view of data from all divisions and locations across your organization. This topology is often deployed to address several different concerns, including bandwidth constraints and privacy/security concerns arising from the transfer of confidential data across borders as it's being indexed.