Autonomy Ships Agentware Products for Knowledge Management
San Francisco, Calif. (April 9, 1998) - Autonomy, Inc. today announced that it has shipped both of its new Agentware products for knowledge management: the Autonomy Agentware Knowledge Server and the Autonomy Agentware Knowledge Update. These two powerful server products are 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, both the products in Autonomy's Agentware knowledge management solution were 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."
Knowledge managers and developers of corporate intranets, including those at such companies as Shell International, Semi-Tech and Barclays Bank, are already using Autonomy's Agentware products for knowledge management.
Autonomy has two products aimed at the knowledge management market:
Agentware Knowledge Server: to help companies automatically leverage the knowledge base of individual employees and 'mine' unstructured information for insight, regardless of the format or source.
Agentware Knowledge Update: to help employees exploit late-breaking industry developments without wasting time surfing the Internet or intranet.
Agentware 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.
Automatically identify employees' areas 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. Use these profiles to make each employee's knowledge base accessible to others.
Provide an easy-to-navigate visual interface for searching that automatically presents a unified view of disparate data sources across the enterprise -- 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. (Visualizer module)
Agentware Knowledge Update eliminates the need for employees to surf the Internet and intranet just to stay up-to-speed on developments that are relevant to their jobs. In conjunction with the Live Alert module, this product:
Monitors hundreds of specified Internet and intranet sites, news feeds and internal repositories containing Lotus Notes, HTML, word processing files, PDF files, and many others
Creates a personalized report informing individual employees of developments that are relevant to their specific jobs.
Alerts the user, via email, fax, pager, channel definition format, or push technology as soon as information of specific interest appears. (Live Alert module)
According to Mel Earp, technical director for the 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 Agentware knowledge management products run on Windows NT and most versions of Unix.
The products, which have been in beta testing since February are now widely available. Pricing for the Knowledge Update starts at $5,000 while the Knowledge Server pricing ranges from $50 to $100 per seat. Companies interested in learning more about the products can contact the company at 415-243-9955 or go to the company's website at www.agentware.com.
The Technology Behind Agentware
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
Autonomy develops software that automatically organizes large, unstructured volumes of information into personally relevant channels to help corporate intranets and commercial websites serve the changing needs and interests of users.
The intelligent pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software was originally developed by Autonomy's sister company, Neurodynamics, for use in British intelligence and defense applications. That 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 is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with offices in Boston, New York, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and Cambridge, UK. Its current customers include News Corp., Barclays Bank, Virgin, NetChannel, Shell International, Semi-Tech, Macmillan Publishing and Unilever.
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