Trend-Setting Products of 2004

A year ago, we introduced our first list of trend-setting products. We thought then that by sorting them into categories--business process management, collaboration, content management, document management, portals and smart enterprise suites—-we'd bring some order into already muddled waters. If it was tough 12 months ago, with the consolidation juggernaut still running at nearly full speed and the blurring of distinct offerings, it was even harder this time around. So we made a conscious decision to not break the products into specific categories. As KMWorld continues to emphasize, knowledge management is not a specific application, rather an attitude, an approach to delivering solutions to an organization, its workers and its customers.

Through conversations with editorial colleagues, a host of analysts and users—-running the gamut from C-level executives to entry-level knowledge workers—-we have listed 56 companies. Well, more than 200 vendors—whose combined product lineup includes more than 1,000 separate offerings—were considered. (As you'll see in our Fall 2004 Buyers' Guide, we list about 1,600 companies that provide, in the broadest sense, KM products or services.) Although the standards we set for inclusion on any of KMWorld's lists are high, we didn't develop a formal, rigid set of criteria that needed to be met for Trends 2004. But like last year, we all agreed that usability, flexibility, adoption rate and total cost of ownership should be consider. And we also identified some vendors for their vision toward the future or for a collection of offerings, rather than a specific product or compelling new version of an existing one.

One thing is certain, though, our informal committee agreed that each company/product listed holds the promise for the marketplace, even if the marketplace has yet to realize it.

Alphablox (recently acquired by IBM) Analytics 5.5 — a business process management platform for custom analytic applications, incorporating new capabilities for data presentation, visualization and analysis.

Anacubis Desktop 2.0 — visual research and analysis software that enables discovery and extraction of intelligence from multiple information sources.

Antarctica Systems and ePlus (eplus.com)--collaboration on a series of software products designed to give corporations increased visibility into their procurement costs to identify opportunities to reduce expenses.

Arbortext Enterprise Publishing Software Suite 5.0 — a centralized repository with content that can be reused, repurposed and updated, allowing organizations to publish content simultaneously in multiple languages, in multiple hard- and soft-copy formats and to multiple audiences internally and externally on demand.

ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance — a Web self-service offering that combines natural language search, an answer repository and personalization capabilities that give users a direct answer to their direct question.

Attensity Relational Extraction Server 3.0 — addresses nuances, relationships and context of everyday language, finding relationships between entities; able to extract those event relationships and then send them into a database; strong set of heuristics describing the English language.

Autonomy Directed Navigation — integrates with Autonomy's core Intelligent Data Operating Layer to deliver accurate results by guiding users through the navigation process to provide advanced, real-time information discovery.

Captiva InputAccel Express — new export modules to transfer electronic documents into enterprise applications provided by IBM, Microsoft, Interwoven and SAP, as well as increased functionality for existing exports such as Documentum 5.2 and eiStream 6.0.

Convera Screening Room — an optional component to the RetrievalWare enterprise search platform that also searches text and audio data, real-time capture, encoding, analysis and cataloguing of video, in addition to closed caption text, text generated by speech-to-text converters and other metadata over corporate intranets/extranets.

Documentum Business Process Management suite — integrates the collaboration capabilities of eRoom with content management and process control through the Documentum process engine.

EMC Documentum Content Storage Services — enables organizations to define and execute storage policies that automate the placement and movement of content across a tiered heterogeneous storage infrastructure.

Endeca Navigation Engine — a directed search engine with deep underlying analytics; more than simple keyword search, a unique approach to information discovery.

Entopia K-Bus — infrastructure software designed to automatically and dynamically discover and deliver relevant content and experts into the day-to-day business process.

Entrieva — suite of categorization, discovery and notification software technology engines to power commercial and government KM initiatives; real-time notification via phone (cell phone or wired line), PDA, e-mail, etc. (using interactive voice and multimodal technologies).

ePeople Teamwork 5.1--integrates with Outlook, allowing users to access relevant information, find help from experts, capture knowledge and work collaboratively with customers and partners.

Exact Software e-Synergy--browser-based business solutions for the enterprise with enabling information discovery and delivery.

Factiva iWorker Search Technology--an algorithm-based system that matches keyword searches to the filtering capability embedded within Factiva's proprietary taxonomy, which consists of company, region, industry, language and subject codes that are universally applied to Factiva's entire content set.

FAST Search and Transfer Enterprise Search Platform — turns collections of internal and external structured and unstructured content into a unified and fully accessible resource unaffected by data format, structure, location or parent application.

FileNet Team Collaboration Manager — -a Web-based, out-of-the-box solution that delivers team collaboration integrated with content management and fully functional business process management (BPM) capabilities.

Genuosity OrderGenerator — software that provides small businesses with an automated toolset that rewards customers when they refer new business.

Google Enterprise Search Appliance--an integrated hardware/software search product that enables corporations, universities and government agencies to deliver search results on their intranets and public Web sites.

Hummingbird Enterprise--portal, collaboration and content management technologies in an integrated suite, as well as e-mail management, expertise location and management, business intelligence and analytics business process management.

Hyperwave ECM Server Platform IS/6--form-based publishing, workflow and a uniform platform for all applications.

Immediatech GoFileRoom Pro--available for accountants and CPA firms that can be implemented online for smaller firms.

Infodata Content Management Services Layer--offering enterprise and government customers the functionality to streamline regulatory compliance mandates, better manipulate electronic documents and facilitate the protection of electronic content as it leaves the network environment.

Intelliseek BlogPulse--free online search and tracking tool that measures and ranks opinions and "buzz" about key issues, people, phrases and links that occur daily in more than a million Internet blogs.

Interwoven OpenDeploy 6--a code and content deployment product within its integrated ECM platform and Web change management solution; facilitates deploying and provisioning Web-based applications and accelerates IT governance initiatives.

Inxight SmartDiscovery suite--advanced unstructured text mining and analytical processing; document summarization, categorization and visualization in a single offering; essentially summarizes information, categorizes it, extracts entities and visualizes that information; Web-capable and Web services-enabled.

ISYS Search Software ISYS:desktop--searches more than 125 data formats, including all MS Office products, e-mail, attachments, PDF, HTML, ZIP files, databases and native format spreadsheets; supports a range of simple search methods.

J.P. Morgan Chase i-VAULT--High-volume image archive service; secure image warehouse with redundant archive sites in the Northeast and Southwest, offering instant access through a Web interface.

KnowledgeBase Solutions' KnowledgeBase.net V 4.0 — combining document and knowledge management with search technology and customizable portals.

Kofax — acquisition of Mohomine enables embedding the already multilingual Ascent Capture engine with categorization capabilities; Mohomine takes a pre-existing taxonomy and can be trained with a relatively small set of documents.

Mindfabric Enterprise 4.1 — new platform support, enhanced business rules, improved knowledge management tools and new test tools, offering lower total cost of ownership and additional opportunities to generate revenue.

MuseGlobal MuseSearch — a federated search tool that provides a single interface for users to enter a search query and retrieve an integrated set of results from many different sources.

Onfolio — a personal KM tool that integrates completely with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office applications, designed to allow users to easily collect, organize and share information they find searching the Internet.

Open Text's acquisition integration — a complete content management solution through its acquisitions of Magellan, Gauss and IXOS integrated with LiveLink, giving customers a single platform to manage corporate Web sites, intranets and extranets.

PiXlogic — a tool that doesn't require textual metadata associated with an image to find a specific image in a collection of documents; a pixel-level search for shapes and angles.

Primus Control-F1 integration--combining support automation and knowledge management software to provide agents and users with accurate answers to computer problems, automate the resolution process and complete the repair cycle.

Recommind MindServer 3.0--pre-built connectors for integration with a variety of portals, document and content management systems, databases and other text sources.

RedDot XCMS 6.0--a single, scalable solution designed for mid-market organizations. The company has also released RedDot CMS 6.0, a core component of XCMS.

SAS SAS9 —-a new platform that connects all SAS applications and communicates with other data sources and programs, which includes the SAS Intelligence Platform, a set of integrated software for data integration, business reporting and analytics, as well as enhanced integration optimization and predictive analytics capabilities.

Serena (formerly Merant) Collage 4.5--a quickly deployable Web content management solution that features automatic workflow generation, incremental content deployment and broader support for Web services and industry platforms such as Windows Server 2003 and the AIX operating system.

ServiceWare Enterprise 5.5--includes Unicode support, a new user interface for ServiceWare Self-Services, the addition of ServiceWare Agent (a new product designed for customer service representatives), ServiceWare Professional, ServiceWare Architect and ServiceWare Administrator.

Sitescape Forum 7.1--enterprise collaboration software designed for greater scalability, enhanced document management capabilities and a richer graphical user interface.

Smead Software Solutions Smeadlink Express — bringing integrated records management and document management to small to medium-sized business; a complete package to manage the document life cycle according to best business practices.

Spotfire — focused visualization tools to finely control and analyze what users see; ability to granularly dial up and down each item of what information displays on the screen.

Stratify (stratify.com) — good approach to dynamic generation of taxonomies, which can then be managed by a few people, rather than numbers of librarians and science people dealing with taxonomies, development and further iterations.

SupportSoft Real-Time Service Management--four new products in the portfolio: Auto Discovery and Metering, Knowledge Center Suite, LiveAssist and VoiceAssist.

Tacit ActiveNet — combines automated expertise sharing and relationship networking in a single solution, allowing users who choose to participate in valuable collaboration with legitimate privacy.

Traction Software TeamPage and Communicator V 3.1 — robust enterprise blogging software that encompasses collaboration, document management and KM.

TOWER Software TRIM Context — keeps all records and documents related to a subject in one place, enabling users to resolve queries and make decisions.

TripleHop MatchPoint 3.0— enterprise contextual search software combining statistical and semantic analysis and including user profile and existing enterprise knowledge.

Verity K2E 5.5 — search, classification and recommendation software that includes five new capabilities said to enable intellectual capital management (ICM) system administrators to better monitor and manage their systems and users to locate or uncover information with greater ease, speed and accuracy, including advance query analytics.

Vignette—enterprise suite with six modular application services: content, portal, collaboration, process, integration and analysis.

YourAmigo Enterprise Search 2.1.5--near real-time indexing of all major document types; search engine index is updated when any document is added, modified, removed or when data changes in a Web-enabled database.