AN INTERVIEW WITH YALI HARARI, CEO OF KAMOON INC
by Tim Staub, assistant editor

DSstar: What is the Kamoon Solution?

HARARI: The Kamoon solution enables organizations to increase sales and maximize customer value by delivering human-provided advice and professional expertise at any stage of a business process online. The result is real business collaboration between customers, professionals and partners. Kamoon offers an end-to-end Knowledge Commerce Solution that connects a customer with specific needs for professional expertise to the right professional, either inside or across an extended enterprise network, by applying business processes for online channel development, smart routing and matching, customer-expert interaction management, transactional bidding and billing, business intelligence, and partner management.

Kamoon's solution enables organizations to effectively address business interactions that are lower in volume but higher in value -- complex, non-repetitive, communications that require human involvement and create profitable customer relationships and online business channels. The form of these critical business interactions can range from simple asynchronous messaging to sophisticated, structured workflow involving links, attachments and other supporting content.

DSstar: Please explain more about what you mean by "Knowledge Commerce."

HARARI: Knowledge commerce is the expertise and service-based interactions of business online and provides a means for companies to monetize their knowledge capital through an online business channel. These interactions between companies, customers, employees and extended enterprise partners contribute to an increasingly networked economy that include the sale of online advisory services, value-added customer assistance, the acquisition of business intelligence, collaboration between partners, and the connectivity of personnel.

DSstar: How does Knowledge Commerce relate to more commonly heard industry phrases such as eCRM and Knowledge Management?

HARARI: The Kamoon Knowledge Commerce solution actually is very complimentary to existing eCRM and KM solutions. Typically, the goal of eCRM solutions is to handle high volumes of customer requests in a highly efficient, highly automated way in order to handle traffic quickly while wringing cost from the customer relationship channel. KM solutions typically provide companies internal knowledge cataloguing and repository solutions, so that the company benefits from the corpus of knowledge built up over time. The Kamoon solution provides the logical bridge between CRM and KM solutions. Again, I'd stress that we partner and align well with other types of enterprise applications like the eCRM and KM type solutions. In fact, we are developing pre-written connectors to major eCRM and KM applications.

DSstar: Who are your primary target clients?

HARARI: Kamoon targets Fortune 1000 companies in the financial services, professional services and information technology verticals. We find our solution is most attractive to companies that have a great deal of value residing in their offline expertise assets, and they'd like to either improve their ability to take their offline business online, or improve their existing online advice provision channel.

DSstar: How does your solution benefit Financial Services institutions?

HARARI: We service Financial Services companies that recognize the opportunity to gain competitive advantage by using Internet technology to provide consumer and commercial clients and prospects access to advice and expertise delivered by professionals inside its organization and through partners. Kamoon provides a powerful and flexible infrastructure software solution that allows financial services professionals to manage client requests for advice and to deliver professional expertise online. Clients can receive information and recommendations regarding products and services from product and sales specialists. And, client managers can efficiently oversee or orchestrate the interactions between clients and key team resources ensuring service quality and driving incremental business opportunities. Employing the Kamoon Solution to manage advice delivery online, our Financial Services clients close more business, increase customer and product persistency, and expand share of customer wallet.

DSstar: What products does Kamoon offer?

HARARI: Kamoon currently offers two products: Kamoon Commerce and Kamoon Match.

Kamoon Commerce is a complete infrastructure software solution that allows firms to either put their own professional advisors online, to link to independent third-party advisors, or to create a powerful combination of the two to compete in a rapidly changing marketplace. The product facilitates online advisory and consulting services and enables companies to leverage their knowledge capital into an online knowledge commerce channel. These firms utilize Kamoon Commerce to generate e-revenues, reach new customer segments, and manage existing clients' needs with their new ability to receive requests, deliver advice, and monetize a low-cost, high efficiency business channel online.

Kamoon Match harnesses our robust Smart Engine to allow companies to make proactive, end-to-end use of their online marketing efforts. Company marketing campaigns across all media drive potential clients to the Web seeking more information and the possibility of buying services online. Qualifying these leads is a critical step in directing the thousands of contacts a campaign can generate into a focused number of serious potential clients prepared to pay for the goods and services a company offers. Qualifying these leads intelligently allows a company to use resources wisely and to generate new accounts efficiently. In service businesses where the time professionals spend concluding a transaction is significant and expensive, this is especially important. Failure to qualify leads effectively absorbs valuable professional time and causes professionals to discount the source of the potential new business. Kamoon Match was developed with this need in mind. It is a complete solution for qualifying Web traffic to provide efficient sales support.

DSstar: What differentiates your product from your competitors?

HARARI: I would point to three components of our solution that are key advantages: our Smart Engine, our Business Intelligence module and our rapid deployment.

The Kamoon Smart Engine ensures that customers and the most appropriate internal or partner resources are matched with great precision, increasing customer satisfaction and business efficiency. And, Kamoon supports varied, custom workflow processes with multiple business process stages and statuses. This flexibility enables an organization to tailor its online business process to meet the unique needs of each customer, seamlessly integrating with its existing Web presence and complementing its off-line delivery models. Our Business Intelligence module allows organizations to rapidly gain insight into all interactions with customers, discerning patterns and trends related to customer needs, product demand, and service delivery. Finally, the implementation of our Solution can be achieved in less than 30 days, which accelerates market insights and reduces business risks.

DSstar: What are the key client benefits of using the Kamoon Solution?

HARARI: Our clients have gained demonstrable benefits from implementing the Kamoon Solution. Key benefits include the generation of higher sales from new customers, the ability to cross-sell more products to existing customers, and the enhanced effectiveness of existing experts and sales professionals. Clients also have gained greater control over their sales and advisory processes due to use of the Kamoon Solution.

DSstar: Can you tell me a little more about the technical makeup of the software?

HARARI: Our solution is platform independent, making use of Java 2 Enterprise Edition, the most comprehensive standard for object oriented programming, and implemented with extensive XML to create a system well suited for distributed environments and Internet applications. Our application Servers, API mechanisms and User Interface layer can be run on any major operating system. We use an Oracle 8i database that is cross-platform and versions exist for almost all operating systems. The Solution supports LINUX/UNIX and NT platforms, including supporting Apache-based Web Servers, Tomcat Servlet Engines, and JRun, JBoss and other J2EE Application Servers.

DSstar: We've heard so many horror stories about lengthy enterprise application installations. How long does it take to implement the Kamoon Solution?

HARARI: Because of our highly flexible Smart Engine technology, we can implement our client solutions within 30 days. In fact, for the clients we have had to date, implementations have taken between 15-20 days. In addition to the speed of implementation, the highly flexible nature of our technology empowers our clients' users to make changes on the fly. This provides huge value to our clients who want to be able to evolve their e-business strategy as they learn more about how they want to monetize their online expertise channels.

Contact Chip Clingham, Director of Marketing, Kamoon Inc 201-242-9311 x2333, chipc@kamoon.com.