Start-up aims to break info bottleneck

The San Francisco, California-based company has rolled out the premier version of Verge Insight, a knowledge management application that automates the capture and organization of information relevant to a particular user's task, the company said.

"Our product enables service professionals to leverage corporate-wide knowledge and expertise to win more deals and run better projects," said Scott Rozic, president and CEO of Verge.

Knowledge management has become a buzz-phrase in the collaborative software industry, which over the past two years has been heavily touted as a new strategy by groupware giant and IBM subsidiary Lotus.

Knowledge management software vendors build products to provide a system for corporations to transform information from various sources--the Web, back-office applications, databases--into client applications for making business decisions.

Rozic said Verge Insight 1.0, which is priced from $50,000, was created to enable companies to manage information related to their specific projects, business processes, and relationships. The company said that for knowledge workers--analysts, consultants, and others--the software allows them to "get smart fast" in preparation for meetings, service calls, or generating proposals.

In essence, the software combines unstructured information, such as Word documents, Web pages, and other text-based content with structured information, such as that contained in corporate databases, and delivers it to users through one integrated application, according to the company.

Robert Moran, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, said he found that the new product's chief value is that it took a tactical approach to knowledge management.

Verge "has found the practical application for their knowledge management product rather than having a solution in search of problem, which has been an issue for many other knowledge management vendors," said Moran.

Verge Insight software monitors each user's interactions and activities to help find and automatically categorize relevant information the user creates or discovers, Rozic explained.

As a result, the software organizes and presents information based on how users work. Data is presented in the context of the user's information history, work profile, and business processes, so that they have relevant information specific to their needs.

The Verge Insight client sits on top of a distributed application server which supports a variety of data connectivity standards.