Autonomy Launches New Knowledge Management Products To Help Companies Leverage Employee Expertise, Late-Breaking News and Existing Information Archives
San Francisco, Calif. (February 17, 1998) - Autonomy, Inc. today announced its new knowledge management solution, a set of uniquely powerful software products designed to help companies gain competitive advantage by automatically leveraging the knowledge base of individual employees, exploiting late-breaking industry developments and 'mining' unstructured information for insight, regardless of the format or source.
According to Autonomy President and CEO Dr. Michael Lynch, Autonomy's knowledge management solution was developed to help companies bypass some of the cultural barriers to knowledge management. "Frankly, it is unrealistic to expect employees to spend a lot of time categorizing or tagging documents that others might find useful, or filling out elaborate questionnaires identifying their areas of expertise," explained Lynch. "Our goal was to make the processes so 'automatic', that effective knowledge management becomes almost a byproduct of normal business functions."
Autonomy's knowledge management solution is also the first enterprise-wide product offering that automatically helps employees identify and take advantage of their colleagues' expertise. "We designed our knowledge management products to make it easy for employees to find not only relevant documents, news articles and email messages, but the contact information of colleagues with the right expertise as well," Lynch said. "After all, to gain and maintain competitive advantage, you need to know whose brains are worth 'picking', whether they are in the office next door or thousands of miles away," said Lynch.
The Autonomy Knowledge Server, the core engine of Autonomy's knowledge management solution, uses advanced pattern recognition technology to automate the categorization, cross-referencing, hyperlinking and presentation of information, virtually eliminating the need for manual labor in the process. The Knowledge Server also can summarize documents and recommend related articles and documents via hypertext links. Because these links are automatically inserted at the time a document is retrieved, they can include references to documents and articles written long after the original document was published. Developed for the defense and intelligence industries, the technology matches ideas or concepts and does not rely on keywords. As a result, it can work in any language.
Thanks to a special visualization applet, the Knowledge Server can automatically present a unified view of disparate data sources across the enterprise. A single query can launch a comprehensive search across multiple sources -- including email messages, word processing files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, Lotus Notes archives, intranet file servers, SQL/ODBC databases, live chat/IRC, newsfeeds, and the expertise profiles of other employees -- and then present the results in an easy to navigate two-dimensional insight "map."
Most important, the Knowledge Server's visualization applet works directly from unstructured data to present results automatically in an intuitive, visual representation. Lynch pointed out that many companies are currently developing data visualization products. "But there's a dirty little secret behind some of the 'whizzy' demos we've all seen of futuristic data visualization products," said Lynch. "Prior to 'visualizing' the data, someone has to prepare it by tagging, sorting or inserting meta data --- a tedious, labor intensive, and therefore expensive task. Our Knowledge Server works automatically."
To make each employee's knowledge base accessible to others, the Knowledge Server uses a profiling system that automatically identifies an employee's area of expertise based on the issues they research on the intranet, the ideas in the documents and email messages they submit to the system and the topics they follow in their Knowledge Update (another component of Autonomy's knowledge management solution). This helps facilitate the creation of virtual workgroups, encourages communication and reduces duplication of effort.
Autonomy's knowledge management solution also has a component aimed at helping employees stay on top of the latest developments. The Autonomy Knowledge Update monitors hundreds of specified Internet and intranet sites and newsfeeds to create a personalized report informing individual employees of developments that are relevant to their specific jobs. The product also can be used to monitor internal documents in many formats, including Lotus Notes, HTML, word processing files, PDF files, and many others. An alarm function can be used to continually monitor specified information sources and alert the user, via email, fax, pager, channel definition format, or push technology as soon as information of specific interest appears.
According to Mel Earp, technical director for Sema Group, a company that provides systems integration, outsourcing and consulting services worldwide, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions have led to changes in working practices, a more fragmented workforce and a subsequent growth in knowledge gaps. "Tacit knowledge retrieval, concept analysis, and automatic tagging are fast becoming essential components of a technical strategy to address the knowledge management issues that businesses face," said Earp. "Autonomy is the only company positioned to effectively meet all of them."
Pricing and Availability
Autonomy's knowledge management solution is in the final stages of beta testing and scheduled to ship this Spring. The product runs on Windows NT and most versions of Unix. Pricing for the Knowledge Update starts at $5,000 while Knowledge Server pricing ranges from $50 to $100 per seat.
The Technology
Autonomy's knowledge management products employ Adaptive Probabilistic Concept Modeling (APCM) algorithms to analyze, sort and cross-reference unstructured data. The method is based on Bayesian statistical probability theorems, Claude Shannon's principles of information theory, and neural networks. Autonomy's APCM-based software identifies key concepts in text along with the associated frequency and relationship of terms most closely correlated with the ideas. Referred to as Concept Agents, the software abstracts can then be used to locate other instances of the pattern of terms and contextual relationships that represent a given concept.
The effectiveness of Concept Agents improves over time as their focus on a specific topic becomes more comprehensive and sophisticated. The agent will actually become skilled at recognizing a relevant topic independently of the language used to describe it, identifying articles on the same topic that might have appeared in a tabloid and a scholarly journal.
The Company
The intelligent pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software was originally developed by founder and CEO Dr. Michael Lynch's first company, Neurodynamics, for use in intelligence and defense applications. Founded in 1991 by Cambridge University researchers, Neurodynamics quickly attained profitability by creating technologies that could match fingerprints, determine the handwritten amounts on checks, or even read license plates.
One of Neurodynamics' biggest challenges was in helping a key defense customer develop software to sort through huge volumes of documents written in different languages or employing intentionally deceptive coded statements. To solve the problem, Neurodynamics developed high-performance, pattern-matching algorithms. These algorithms, based on Claude Shannon's principles of information theory, Bayesian probabilities, and the latest research in neural networks, became the foundation for an approach called Adaptive Probabilistic Concept Modeling (APCM). The technique was used to create Concept Agents--bits of software capable of understanding the main idea in a text and then finding similar documents simply by analyzing the patterns of symbols and context.
The APCM technology is at the heart of the British police force's Holmes2 system, named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective. The Holmes2 system helps the police solve crimes by matching fingerprints or by finding similarities and connections in disparate crime witness statements or police reports. The same technology is now being used to find connections in commercial data.
Autonomy was founded in March, 1996 and remains a privately held company. Autonomy is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices in Roseland, New Jersey, and Cambridge, England. Its current customers include News Corp., Barclays Bank, Virgin and Sweet & Maxwell.
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