KnowNow Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif., provider of event-driven integration solutions, has released KnowNow 3 Enterprise Edition. User companies are in industries that include financial services, manufacturing, supply chain management, aerospace and defense.
The LiveServer component intelligently routes messages while LiveConnectors components enable event-driven publish/subscribe messaging over native hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). The LiveSheet component allows users to share information among multiple spreadsheets on multiple systems.
“KnowNow 3 Enterprise Edition delivers information to the people who need it while the value of that information is still very high,” says Michael Terner, president and chief executive officer of KnowNow. “We solve business problems previously unaddressed by any other technology, making organizations more nimble, and providing significant competitive advantage.”
“There are important financial and strategic benefits to implementing event-driven business processes because they suit the inherently event-driven nature of many aspects of the real world. Event-driven business processes are not just traditional processes made to run faster; rather, they have specific characteristics that distinguish them from internally driven processes,” says Roy Schulte, vice president, Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based research and consulting firm. “Event-driven design will be ‘the next big thing’ in business architecture and in Information Technology, because it brings unprecedented power to support dynamic and multifaceted business processes.”
Richard Treadway, KnowNow vice president of marketing and strategy, states, “We’ve focused on integrating people in this equation, their browsers, spreadsheets and similar documents rather than working with back-end systems. Publish/subscribe messaging is loosely coupled, so you can start immediately without tremendous upfront agreements on structures. We just look like a Web server on the network.”
One user cited by Treadway, Fujitsu, had a problem with assuring that resellers all had the latest spreadsheet for pricing. Using “really simple syndication” (RSS) technology that pushes data over the Internet when there is a change in a document that is subscribed to, Fujitsu was able to update information in just the cells of the spreadsheet that changed—at the time of the change.
