Delano Ships Knowledge Management Server

Delano Technology Corporation, a leading provider of interaction-based e-business solutions for the enterprise, announced the release of the Delano Knowledge Management Server, a value-added software product that integrates with and extends the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite to add artificial intelligence (AI) assisted technology to enable companies to automatically manage, capture, categorize, cross-reference and route information and knowledge across their extended enterprise. The Delano Knowledge Management Server, which is built upon Autonomy's pattern matching technology, provides flexible and powerful natural language and language-independent search capabilities to effectively interpret and manage free-form text received from e-mail messages, wireless devices, or Web-based forms.

"Our goal is to help our customers achieve significant business benefits by providing them with an extensible platform that can be used to rapidly deploy a wide range of applications that manage both simple and complex interactions across their organization," said Bahman Koohestani, executive vice president, products and chief technology office of Delano. "By leveraging the open, component-based architecture of the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, we can very quickly extend our core technology and deliver added functionality to address our customer's most critical business needs. Information is a critical corporate asset and the Delano Knowledge Management Server, which is based on one of the most comprehensive pattern matching technologies available today, will enable our customers to effectively exploit their knowledge assets to achieve long-term success."

Delano Knowledge Management Server Drives Top Line Business Results

The Delano Knowledge Management Server gives any organization complete control over business-critical data. Among the benefits the Delano Knowledge Management Server brings to market, is increased customer satisfaction through personalized self-service portals that enable customers to accurately and effectively obtain information, such as that relating to orders or inquiries. Also, by providing a central location for searching and accessing structured and unstructured information from disparate sources such as the Internet, corporate intranets or extranets, databases and file systems, the Delano Knowledge Management Server enables the efficient distribution of time-sensitive information. Most importantly, because the Delano Knowledge Management Server seamlessly integrates with and extends the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, Delano's robust e-business platform, organizations can rapidly deploy interaction-based e-business applications that span the entire enterprise and leverage AI-assisted technology to exploit knowledge assets. The ability to tap information as needed to respond to customer queries, provide web-based self-service, check inventory or product specifications, or perform a host of other knowledge-based functions offers Delano customers a distinctive competitive advantage, and enables them to achieve significant business benefits.

Knowledge eXchange BV is a Delano customer based in the Netherlands, focused on establishing business portals across Europe. Knowledge eXchange is using the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite to manage all customer interactions for its portals, with a major emphasis on e-mail marketing and response management. As a beta tester and customer for the Delano Knowledge Management Server, Rene de Vries, CTO of Knowledge eXchange, commented, "the Delano Knowledge Management Server enables us to more effectively and intelligently manage and route all incoming e-mail messages. Its use as a 'recommendation' and content management engine is unsurpassed, and enables us to provide value added services on our portal. As Delano continues to expand its platform, we continue to gain a competitive lead in our market."

According to Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, while e-mail and the Web are being used more frequently to respond to, sort, and route customer inquiries, the process can be very time-consuming and intensely manual. "By using Autonomy's technology, Delano will ensure that electronic interactions managed by its applications are automatically categorized and distributed to the right destination - without manual intervention," said Lynch. "This will enable Delano's customers to respond to queries faster, decrease customer service costs, and improve customer service and loyalty." Delivering Intelligent Inbound Response Management; Self-service Interaction Portal

Using the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, any enterprise can develop and deploy an inbound response management application that provides effective auto-responses and intelligent routing, by leveraging the Delano Knowledge Management Server to accurately interpret customer requests against established knowledge bases. Using the Delano Knowledge Management Server, an enterprise can also cultivate a collaborative environment of knowledge sharing among employees, and can manage the dissemination of information to business partners, suppliers, customers, and prospects by providing a self-service interaction portal that enables information and documents to be automatically categorized, cross-referenced, and retrieved. Built on a foundation of solid technology

The Delano Knowledge Management Server is made up of four distinct pieces: The Delano Knowledge Management Server, which includes document servers to index documents; category servers to create, train or re-train categories; and category training document servers to store the documents and training text for categories. An Administration Tool is used to define and configure knowledge bases, and a Web Administration Tool provides remote administration through any Web browser. Knowledge Base Components are integrated with the application builder environment of the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, enabling organizations to develop and deploy e-business applications that interact with knowledge bases on the knowledge server.

Knowledge Base Components include: a Knowledge Base Category Trainer to teach and maintain categories, and a Knowledge Base Text Categorizer used to match categories to text. A Knowledge Base Search component uses natural language and language-independent search facilities-such as relevancy ranking, Boolean, proximity, wildcard, fuzzy logic, and soundex-to search a knowledge base. Knowledge Base add/delete allows a user to index HTML and plain text meta-information obtained from internal and external sources into the knowledge base. A Web Content Import component enables Web content to be imported from external Web sites. Lastly, Text Manipulation and File Management Functions assist with the manipulation of text, management of files, and processing of query results.

Availability, Pricing, and System Requirements

The Delano Knowledge Management Server is immediately available from Delano Technology Corporation or authorized Delano resellers. It runs on Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4 or higher, and requires the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite 2.0 or higher. Pricing varies depending on enterprise configuration.

About the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite

The Delano e-Business Interaction Suite is a software platform for developing and deploying powerful and diverse applications that enable an enterprise to interact with its customers, partners, suppliers, and employees, for fast, measurable results. The platform, which is built on open standards, complements and easily extends a company's existing technology investments. The platform includes the Delano e-Business Application Builder, a rapid application builder environment for developing interaction-based e-business applications; and the Delano e-Business Interaction Server, a highly scalable server designed to simultaneously run thousands of applications. The platform enables companies to deploy e-business applications that span the entire enterprise, from the back office to the front office, including sales, marketing, service, finance, operations and human resources. Delano's speed of deployment coupled with the strategic breadth of the solution enables companies to quickly increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

About Delano Technology Corporation

Delano Technology Corporation is a leading provider of interaction-based e-business solutions that enable an organization to interact with its customers, partners, suppliers, and employees. At the core of Delano's enterprise e-business solution is the Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, a software platform for rapidly deploying e-business applications that span the entire enterprise-including sales, marketing, service, finance, operations, and human resources-and enable companies to increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Delano's e-business solution is currently powering some of today's leading enterprises, including BCE Emergis, Charles Schwab Canada, Clarify, Commerx (for PlasticsNet.Com), Ericsson, Harborfreight.com, Macromedia, and Mark VII. Delano is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario with offices in New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and the United Kingdom. For additional information, contact Delano Technology Corporation, 40 West Wilmot Street, Richmond Hill, ON, L4B 1H8; Tel: 905-764- 5499; Fax: 905-764-7445; www.delanotech.com.