Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

KnowNow, Inc.
Mountain View, CA

Event Router and Microservers
> Application Internetworking

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

KnowNow customers are innovators who deeply understand how to use technology to drive customer-visible differentiation of business services. Reference customers included a financial services firm and two B2B marketplaces. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Enhancing the user experience

§ Developing a new class of enterprisewide and inter-enterprise applications

WHY KNOWNOW?

KnowNow is enabling the next generation of business integration by using the Internet to continually exchange information reliably and securely across the enterprise and through corporate firewalls to business partners. The persistent connection provided by KnowNow provides guaranteed bi-directional data delivery, enabling a new level of interactivity and responsiveness. KnowNow's Web-native publish-and-subscribe software is both standards-based and platform-neutral, making it easy to deploy with maximum flexibility and scalability. With KnowNow, companies can interchange up-to-date information from any source to any end point—be it a browser, a user’s desktop or mobile device, an embedded system, a traditional middleware queue, a data warehouse, or a server in a partner’s data center. Data can be aggregated or transformed in flight.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: KnowNow’s customers are developing Web-based applications that set new standards in usability, pioneer new forms of e-commerce not previously possible, or both. These projects are in pilot or the early stages of deployment. Even so, providing real-time updates has already delivered considerable value to end users.

Enterprise innovation: Reference customers are building systems in corporate or market/auction settings that enable people to make decisions and take action based on real-time bi-directional information exchange. With KnowNow, each participating organization achieves finer-grained control over its activities.

Technology gains: Technology architects say KnowNow is an architecture to build on. It provides all the functionality of publish-and-subscribe middleware. Simple, standards-based, nonintrusive, and highly scalable, it is an end-to-end integration platform for rich applications that extend across the company and beyond its firewall to customers and partners.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Because KnowNow adds new capabilities, it is important to spend time in the design phase to understand how distributed processing and real-time updates affect the user experience, the application architecture, and the interface to legacy systems. If you are using KnowNow to enhance an existing application, go back and rethink the user interface. This can be as simple as making cosmetic changes to page layout in order to maximize the visual appeal of real-time updates and responses.

Learning: Because it builds on Internet standards and architectural principles, KnowNow has a modest learning curve for developers and administrators alike. Almost any programmer can pick up KnowNow and quickly improve the interactivity of a Web-based user interface. Good architectural skills are required to design an application in which processing is distributed across multiple interacting nodes. C++ skills and a familiarity with multithreading are required to integrate a filter or a security module directly into the KnowNow Event Router.

Resources: When developing the most ambitious applications, customers recommend consulting with KnowNow’s professional services team to size the initial implementation and develop a plan to scale as traffic grows.

Fit: KnowNow is a good fit where nondeterministic real-time data exchange is required across the enterprise and with external business partners.

COMPANY INFO

KnowNow is a privately held company with 55 employees.

650.641.8500
www.knownow.com
Published: January 2002