Verity bolsters enterprise search software

by Ann Sullivan

August 10, 2001 —

Verity Inc.'s latest search software is designed to address the all-too-common challenge for companies of trying to quickly get the right information to the right people.

What sets Verity's K2 Enterprise (K2E) software apart is that it includes search, classification and personalization features in a single package.

Designed to speed the delivery of data to business portal and intranet users, K2E searches portal content, organizes the data it discovers, and gets the data to end users by way of Verity's Social Networks personalization features. Social Networks link users and the documents they create, modify, access and search. Using this information, the software identifies "experts" within a company and connects them to other end users. K2E will also recommend documents based on end users' browsing behavior and search criteria. For example, an engineer searching for a product's technical specifications may also locate the product's developers and relevant resources, according to Verity.

Typical search software for business portals has so far been a big disappointment, says Hadley Reynolds, director of research at Delphi Group. With K2E, Verity raises the bar for what's required of enterprise search software, he says.

While some functionality similar to that found in K2E is available from other information retrieval specialists such as Autonomy and Convera, or Web-focused search vendors Inktomi and Google, Verity is the first to package a full range of search components in a single distributed platform that's scalable for enterprise use, Reynolds says.

K2E runs on Windows NT/2000 and Solaris. It can be linked to third-party sources including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Documentum's offerings and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant databases.

Users of Verity's portal infrastructure software include AT&T, Cisco, Home Depot and Siemens. Deloitte Consulting, a Verity customer since 1998, is planning to implement K2E into its corporate portal so its 15,000 consultants can more easily make use of material contained in the company's 250,000 documents.

K2E began shipping this month. Average pricing is US$200,000.

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