Everest, a company within the troubled PinkRoccade NV IT services group, has used a technology it calls Knowledge Framework in services deals, but until now it has been part of an IT services package and never sold standalone.
According to the company’s knowledge consultant Mark Mastop, its customers have been asking for the software to be productized in order to be assured of a more predictable release cycle, as well as having the benefit of a user group. But the company – and especially its parent PinkRoccade – will be hoping that the new software will bring in much-needed sales to new customers too.
Knowledge Framework – as it is currently called – will of course be used as a beachhead by Everest in its attempts to win new business. But Mastop said that the Everest division of PinkRoccade has been growing strongly and seeing excellent take-up of its services, which centre on providing rules engine technology and services that enable companies to define, deploy and subsequently manage their business processes in a more automated, reusable and ultimately timely fashion, than is feasible with processes that have been hard-coded. He claimed that the company is flat-out with projects already.
There are few success stories when it comes to services companies that try their hand at selling products, but Mastop said he believes that because the company has been developing and implementing the software for some time, it should find the addition of a traditional software licensing element to its business achievable. However he said that the company will initially target the software at its domestic Netherlands market and only once successful consider expanding to other regions, and even then very probably with the help of distributors or partners who are already au fait with software sales.
Everest has an interesting take on the whole area of business rules software, which is used to manage the processes that make every business tick. The company specializes in the rules engine itself, rather than developing a fully-fledged business process management system (BPMS) that would by necessity include such features as message transport (human to human, human to system and system to system), rich business activity monitoring (BAM) and more.
But the company’s rules engine looks to have all of the critical elements that make standalone rules engines valuable. Once implemented, the interface can be customized so that non-technical business users can modify business processes, hence relieving the IT department from many of the more mundane change request tasks. The company claims to have around 75 customers using the technology, albeit nearly all in the Netherlands, and has implemented it successfully in sectors ranging from Endemol Entertainment’s new dietary web presence, BodyOn, to a range of financial institutions, manufacturing and more.
But the company claims the biggest differentiator for its rules engine is the ability to not only implement business rules(which always provide a definite answer), but also to use fuzzy logic to provide answers that are less certain but are given a weighting. What all this means is that the rules are more flexible, and also that things which are hard to put a definite rule on – such as the likelihood of a family enjoying a camping trip, or of someone buying insurance accepting a higher no-claims-bonus – can still be offered by the business process, subject to approval by a user.
Everest has its work cut out, however, to go from Netherlands-based services and rules technology purveyor to a serious competitor in the more horizontal world of software sales. Competitors in the rules engine space include the likes of Fair Isaac, Ilog, Computer Associates, ESI, Hailey, Pegasystems and others.
