Mr. Whistance: I have been in business about 20 years, initially in a small software house. And that developed through to about 10 years ago where we were focusing on the business intelligence market. We had a report writing tool. We distributed an American product initially but we were let down over the delivery of a Windows solutions and we finished up developing our own product. But we were late to market because we started late. Then when we tried to raise some money to really take the thing to market in a big way, we were unable to do that because major players like Cognos, Business Objects, really had taken that market, or in the eyes of the City they had taken that market. We then set about developing technology that would be at the start of a new phase rather than the end of an established phase. We recognized knowledge management as being an area that we felt would blossom and grow. We seeded the developments of some technology in a Manchester University-based incubator called Campus Ventures. Out of that came a sophisticated technology that is now branded as Deskartes. We would call it a second generation knowledge management product and using those sophisticated technologies based on mathematical algorithms as being a second generation solution that solved the problems of the first generation which was cumbersome products, you needed experts to use, and were very expensive. By using neural networks that learned from experience and natural language processing that allows an easy user interface amongst other things, we felt that we had a knowledge management solution that would overcome these early difficulties.
TWST: The last report from the company detailed that sales were up 242%, so I am assuming that the product has caught on well. Could you just talk about what is turning out such good numbers? How is the market for the product?
Mr. Whistance: Well, we certainly see that knowledge management is a fast growing market. Companies such as Ovum Limited and HSBC have recently conducted research that suggests the market will grow to tens of billions of dollars. In Ovum’s case about 12.3 billion by 2004. HSBC are suggesting that as the market widens with new applications that this would approach 40 billion. So it is a huge market. Now, we believe our technology has a place in that. We have three products. We have our Deskartes® Domain product, our early product that was focused very much as a departmental solution, horizontal in that it can be used very well in a help desk or call center, Web-based support, and e-hyphen learning space. In our first period, our first year, our sales grew from nothing to £2.1 million pounds, so about 3 or 3-1/2 million. So we quickly established it as a product that we can sell. And obviously now, we are backing that by extensive promotional campaigns to roll that Domain product out. We have recently launched two new products, Deskartes Personal, which allows a user to find information easily on their own PC but then can escalate to the Web. And Deskartes Universal which is an enterprise product - it adds the power of our knowledge discovery and our departmental product. It also adds collaboration services or knowledge sharing. So we can share knowledge easily within and out with of an organization. So, that universal product is pitched very much at the total enterprise rather than a departmental solution.
Tickers included in this excerpt: KMS.L
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.