KnowNow CEO Readies RSS Management Plan

KnowNow is small company that has existed in the shadows of the Web services market by helping accelerate performance of Web services-based applications. But with the rise of Web logs--and the bandwidth-hogging RSS protocol used to distribute Web log content--the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based integration software vendor may be poised for a breakout year with its release of new RSS management tools. In an interview with Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, KnowNow CEO Michael Terner explains how a revolution of collaboration on the Web is creating new opportunities for solution providers--and even helping some VARs develop inexpensive ways to report sales back to vendors.

CRN: How would you describe what KnowNow does?

TERNER: Our focus is on getting information to the desktop and keeping integration simple. We made it possible to make the browser smarter. A browser today doesn't give you an update unless you hit a refresh key or unless you install some additional software like Java on your computer. We can update data on a page in realtime.

CRN: How does that work in the context of the RSS protocol used to distribute Web log content?

TERNER: We put in an RSS solution for ING, one of the largest banks in Europe, that allows them to utilize, manage and control RSS within their corporation. They have over 100,000 employees, and they've been using IBM WebSphere portal to distribute information to employees. They also have news feeds they wanted to distribute to employees through the portal. You can get a portlet from IBM for RSS, but today it only handles one feed. Of course, they wanted it to be able to handle multiple feeds, and they didn't want to install code on the client. Finally, it also helps them address a key problem that is emerging from the deployment of RSS. With users doing updates every hour or every four hours, you're bombarding the infrastructure internally. With our server, we deliver information only when there's new information. It eliminates all of the pulling requests. KnowNow remembers who you are and what you're interested in and keeps the link open in such a way that there's no traffic on the lines. It's a publish-and-subscribe model.

CRN: How will you package that to make it more accessible?

TERNER: We've been contemplating packaging this onto the enterprise's syndication server. We believe we can make this facility for delivering information in realtime available to any reader.

CRN: Could those same concepts be applied to the development of dashboards associated with business intelligence applications?

TERNER: We did a project with Fujitsu PC. Once they ship a product through a reseller, they needed to know from the reseller where it went so they can manage inventory and determine what commission to pay at the end of the quarter. But a big bunch of their smaller resellers didn't have any sort of system you could integrate with to get that data. So they were e-mailing Excel spreadsheets to Fujitsu. Fujitsu was then looking at this thing for 90 days trying to figure out how to reconcile what they thought they shipped and what the resellers told them they had in order to figure out what was missing and deal with salespeople who were saying they were underpaid.

Now Fujitsu gets an update to its Excel spreadsheets in realtime when the product ships. As resellers distribute those products, they punch in the ZIP code of where it went, and that's immediately visible back at Fujitsu. During the course of a quarter, the sales management team knows exactly what products are where and if they need to move something from one place to another at the end of the quarter. So people get paid faster and more accurately, and Fujitsu doesn't have to deal with people that are underpaid, always mad and unhappy. And the management team gets to know what's going on and has visibility.

CRN: What other uses have you found for this technology?

TERNER: You can build an application that doesn't require software to be installed. E-mail and Excel are an integration problem that hasn't been resolved yet. We built an application that is on our Web site that looks like an RSS reader. We set that thing up so the headers change color as it ages. Because we have a publish-and-subscribe model, management can view activity such as responses to incoming calls by simply being a master subscriber. It requires good business partners to be able to build these applications, but it doesn't require a complex application developer because there's no client code to install and most of the work of getting the information moved around is being done by the system. In many ways, this allows you to treat the data sources as a service for the client, whether it has software running on it or not. So you enable that whole software-as-a-service model.