Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ENTOPIA BRANCHES OUT FROM KM TO CONTENT INTEGRATION
By Nick Patience For the451.com

Last time we spoke with Entopia, it was touting its knowledge management (KM) product Quantum as a way for companies to unobtrusively collect information and data as part of regular working practices. We noted that by requiring companies to store that data in a separate Quantum repository, Entopia would face some challenges, since companies increasingly prefer to leave data where it currently resides and use metadata to find it.

It appears to have addressed that fundamental issue with a new product called K-Bus. Although it does not offer as rich an environment as Quantum, K-Bus has other things in its favor that Quantum lacks, notably its architecture.

Impact Assessment

The Message

Entopia is branching out from its knowledge management roots to take on the content integration market, which for some customers might be largely the same thing.

Competitive Landscape

In the case of K-Bus, Entopia's competition seems to come more from the handful of content integration plays –- Agari, Context Media, Venetica -– than from traditional KM companies. Metamatrix, focused on the structured EII business, seems more complementary. On the traditional KM front, Open Text, IBM Lotus and Microsoft SharePoint are among the larger players.

The451 Assessment

With K-Bus, Entopia has listened to customer trends and responded with a product that builds on what it learned from Quantum. We think K-Bus will be seen as a content integration play in the marketplace until the company can build more KM features into it, if that is ultimately what it wants to do.

Context

Entopia was formed in 1999 by serial entrepreneur Kamran Elahian and Entopia's CEO Lionel Baraban. Having started life with a desktop-only product, it launched Quantum in October 2001.

Quantum can pull information from a variety of sources, including Web sites, Microsoft Office documents, PDFs and structured sources, such as CRM or contact management applications, where information is fed in via forms. That data can then be classified and searched. Indeed, Entopia is so proud of its search engine that it claims to win some deals over the specialist search engine vendors, although it does not want to be known as a search engine vendor.

The data is pulled in by users via a Windows desktop or a Web-based client, which offer very similar functionality. It's basically a case of delimiting the content and storing it in Quantum. Quantum is on version 1.5 now, with 1.6 due in the fourth quarter, featuring real-time collaboration among other enhancements.

K-Bus, however, is a slightly different beast from Quantum, which Entopia still promotes and sells just as actively as it ever did.

Products

Introduced in February and shipped in May, K-Bus is a metadata repository. It has links to back-end data sources, such as e-mail repositories, Notes, document management systems and obviously Quantum, and to front-end applications such as a knowledge visualization tool, integration with Salesforce.com and a reporting tool that informs users about the utility of their knowledge base. K-Bus can also act as an enterprise search tool, according to the company.

Like Quantum, K-Bus derives rich but configurable metadata from each document it processes, including who originally produced it, who made changes to it, which departments or work groups it belongs to and how often it has been accessed. Each of those metadata types can drive various applications. For instance, the personal metadata collected enables subject matter experts within a company to be identified and metadata derived from applications can enable relevancy rankings in search returns.

K-Bus includes a Web-based interface that is customizable using DHTML and JavaScript, so companies can present K-Bus as an end-user tool in itself. Web services interfaces are available to integrate it with portals (Entopia is working on its first packaged portlets) or to drive applications.

The applications mentioned earlier as well as Entopia Knowledge Locator, the search engine, K-Map, the (somewhat basic) visualization tool, the Knowledge Asset Management reporting tool and K-Force (for Salesforce.com integration) have all been written by Entopia. K-Force is available starting this month. It enables Salesforce.com users to launch queries into K-Bus directly from the Salesforce.com interface. All the applications can also work on top of Quantum if a customer has that installed.

Entopia also chose to write all the back-end connectors itself rather than license them from a company such as Venetica. It has written connectors to Documentum, Open Text Livelink and IBM Lotus Notes. This effort was not required for Quantum because it uses its own repository.

Aside from the architecture, one major difference between Quantum and K-Bus is the lack of collaborative features in K-Bus -- for that companies must buy Quantum, and Entopia reports interest in K-Bus has prompted a few Quantum purchases already. The eventual aim is to have a consistent set of collaboration features across both products, or at least have some closer link at that level between the two.

K-Bus, like Quantum, hooks into existing LDAP directories so permissions can be maintained and runs on J2EE application servers. K-Bus is currently on version 1.1, with 1.2 due at year-end, featuring more connectors and integration of metadata from applications. It costs about $199 per seat plus a per-server charge of about $20,000, with volume discounts.

Customers

In December, Entopia reported about a dozen customers. Although it does not want to disclose the current number, we consider its growth since then to be respectable. Customers are in the government, petrochemical, financial services and consumer packaged goods sectors. It reports about half a dozen paid pilots for K-Bus so far.

Competition

In the case of K-Bus, Entopia's competition is slightly different from the traditional KM vendors it comes up against when selling Quantum. To us it seems quite similar to the handful of content integration plays out there -- Entopia calls K-Bus' approach "enterprise knowledge infrastructure" (EKI). Its differentiator is the type of metadata it stores about each document, which in turn makes for more useful applications.

Venetica's VeniceBridge product comprises connectors to back-end data sources and support for the JSR 170 content repository standard. Its claim is not so much to create the metadata around the documents, but to provide users with real-time access to the documents. So in that sense it is not direct competition to Entopia unless the customer sees K-Bus as a content integration play, which is a possibility in our view.

Context

Media is another content integration firm. Its Interchange product aims to provide a single view of content across various repositories by extracting metadata about the documents or the documents themselves. It is perhaps closer to Entopia than Venetica is. Agari offers a product called Media Bus that aims to provide access to content. It is more focused on the media business than the others.

Two content management vendors making content integration plays are Vignette and Day Software.

Perhaps Metamatrix provides the most interesting contrast and opportunity for Entopia in the near term. It is one of the very few remaining independent enterprise information integration (EII) companies left after Enosys was bought by BEA and Nimble by Actuate. Entopia and Metamatrix share a common investor in the Invus Group. And it's fairly simple to see prospective customers evaluating Entopia and Metamatrix in a bake-off, although Metamatrix is focused on structured data rather than the largely unstructured content that is Entopia's focus, and the two could thus be seen as complementary.

Quantum's main competition as a standalone KM tool comes from a variety of sources; larger players include Open Text, IBM Lotus and Microsoft SharePoint.