Enigma, the leading provider of business-to-business e-commerce for spare parts and aftermarket support, has been awarded a grant by the Israeli Government to lead a consortium to develop a finite set of generic technologies in the area of Knowledge Inferring. The grant for the whole consortium - called KITE - is $16 million. A recent study commissioned by the Israeli Government estimates the global Knowledge Inferring market size to be as much as $5 billion in 2002 with a growth rate of between 50-100 percent per year.
The KITE Consortium aims to develop technologies that will allow enterprises to extract and infer knowledge from structured and non-structured information. The information is captured from an organization's different data channels such as mail, audio support and CRM systems. The relevant knowledge is then manipulated and targeted for different functions in the organization and integrated with existing enterprise information systems.
The developed technologies will be deployed in areas ranging from business-to-business e-commerce systems, generic knowledge management tools, CRM systems, decision support systems, support centers, call centers and other portions of the business-to-business market.
``Today's companies are facing a real problem in how to store, manage and exploit company knowledge in an efficient way,'' says Ronnen Armon, chairman of KITE and general manager and CTO at Enigma. ``There are huge amounts of data flowing through organizations, with very little synchronization. Combined with frequent changes in personnel, this can seriously affect the quality level of decisions taken at the operational level,'' continues Armon.
Knowledge management is an established industry term and an area with many developed technologies, however any reasonably sized organization also requires tools for Knowledge Inferring - basically turning information into best practice.
Knowledge Inferring focuses on the importance of locating core problems present in the process of capturing and reusing information. Most of the existing Knowledge Inferring applications are based on highly structured data, and provide customized solutions.
KITE will focus on addressing the most critical links to achieve better decision-making at the operational level. These include coverage of non-structured and semi-structured data sources (including audio streams and IP sessions), and Knowledge Inferring by means of a comprehensive rules base acting on all unified data sources and addressing both data and meta-data.
The grant is funded under the Magnet Programme, by the office of The Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Trade, with the purpose of strengthening the Israeli industry's technological expertise and enhancing its competitiveness in international markets. The KITE Consortium, lead by Enigma, consists of three other high-tech companies and three academic research groups from Israeli universities: NICE Systems, TopTier Technologies, ESI, Tel-Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and Ben-Gurion University. The current funding is for a three-year program.
``KITE is the 22nd consortium to be activated in the Magnet Programme and is the first out of four new Consortia to be approved and launched in the year 2000,'' says Ilan Peled, general manager of the Magnet Programme. ``We believe that the development of a generic infrastructure for Knowledge Inferring by KITE will enable the Consortium members to offer advanced technologies that will help them achieve a leading-edge advantage and enhance their competitive position in worldwide markets.''
The products developed through KITE technologies will most likely be packaged by each company as part of a comprehensive solution, or as add-ons to existing IT infrastructure. Rather than one integrated system combining all technologies that are developed under KITE, partial combinations of the developed technologies will address various market opportunities.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on August 16, 2000.