The word verity can be defined as something of inevitably true value. As its growing list of customers can attest, Verity, Inc. based in Sunnyvale, California is making every effort to live up to its name by developing portal infrastructure software to allow companies to effectively manage their knowledge and information resources. Founded in 1988, the company recognized early on that knowledge is power and developed one of the first full-text search solutions. Today, Verity's products include Agent Server, Intranet Spider, and Knowledge Server. Verity software helps users access information that is stored in multiple formats and locations, such as corporate intranets, extranets, and business Web portals. The company provides services to ecommerce merchants, government agencies, Internet publishers, market exchanges, and online service providers with customers like Adobe Systems, Intel, Lotus, and Sybase.

The promise of obtaining accurate and timely information as quickly as possible in both ecommerce and enterprise environments attracts companies that are looking for ways to best leverage technology investments and increase their bottom line. "What we do as a company is manage unstructured data," says Anthony Bettencourt, Verity's president. "This is all the information within a global 2000 or any business site that doesn't fit inside of a relational database." Typically, this accounts for approximately 80% of a company's data. All businesses, no matter the size, understand all too well the sheer volume of data that can rapidly accumulate. Things like Word documents, PowerPoint files, spreadsheets, and content management repositories are but a few items in a long list of content that can bog business down if not managed well. Bettencourt believes that astute corporations have recognized the value in organizing such information and categorizing it so that it can be disseminated in real-time fashion. Then, this "unstructured data" morphs into useful information that will help a company increase its ability to stay profitable, including making well-informed business decisions, accelerate products to market, and even change the economics of its business.

Search That Works
For anyone who has ever conducted a fruitless search for much-needed answers, Verity spells relief by creating systems to organize information correctly and making it searchable. Organization is implemented in a variety of ways "We can automatically organize it or provide some simple easy-to-use tools that lets users build business rules around the data," says Bettencourt. "They can also organize it to their own structure, and we can also personalize it for them." The key is to connect people with the information they want and need. For large corporations, this includes locating experts within their own organizations and targeting specific kinds of information that is relevant to certain business tasks. The larger the company, the greater the challenge is to effectively manage information.

Siemens Corporation is one such company that requires deft organization to operate smoothly. The U.S. holding company for the German electrical engineering and electronics group Siemens AG, it manages the operations of 30 companies that design and manufacture electrical and electronic systems. "It has 5,000 advanced R&D developers," says Bettencourt. "A problem in the past has been that their product lines are so complex that trying to figure out which components work effectively with other components became a pretty daunting task. By using Verity technology, Siemens built a sophisticated system to manage the interaction between these components." The combination of organizing the data and building a decision-support system has produced impressive results: the company has determined that over a five-year period they will save roughly $32 million in productivity.

"A company like Cisco," says Bettencourt, "has taken our technology and has used it as a way to automate all of their tech-support activities so that frequently-asked questions and threads from users are organized and automatically pushed out to users via email, CD-ROM, or DVD media." He says, "Cisco estimates they save roughly $25 to $30 million per year, not only in deferring hires for tech support, but also because they've stopped shipping out hardcopy documentation and ship everything out on electric media instead."

The same economics apply to equities research applications for firms like Salomon Smith Barney, UBS, or Morgan Stanley Dean Witter where information is king. "These companies are all very focused on trying to get the best data to their prize clients," according to Bettencourt. "Verity accelerates that process, by not only saving them time by giving them easier access to data, but we also fundamentally change the economics of those activities."

Time and Money Matters
Properly managing information saves both time and money, extremely valuable for companies, that, when they become more efficient are able to stay competitive. Bettencourt explains how effective organization helped Southwest Bell Corporation sift through its tariff data in record time. Using Verity software, this three-week process was reduced to a mere three to four days. "There's a hard savings when you look at time-to-market," he says. "The company gains 20 selling days that they wouldn't have had otherwise."

Time can often be the enemy of busy employees. Nothing is worse than searching and not finding the answers needed to problem-solve in a hurry. By analyzing the frequency and nature of queries conducted each day, Verity can help companies improve day-to-day operations. Its software solutions continue to sell even in a harsh economic climate. The reason is simple: saving time means saving money. Bettencourt says, "We can say to a company, 'We believe that based upon our expertise, we are going to save your employees this much time per day in looking for and finding critical data.'" Thus, Verity continues to highlight value and return on investment as essential selling points in order to get applications deployed within organizations.

Although Verity's business focus has been to serve the enterprise market, it has also helped to contribute to efficiency on the World Wide Web. While many traditional brick-and-mortar companies have developed ecommerce sites, the problem has always been to develop effective navigation and search in order to attract and retain online customers. Even large, expensive sites often lacked an effective search feature that would connect consumers with the products they wanted without undue frustration. Verity examined some well-known brand ecommerce sites and found that often 15% of all queries were returning zero hits. "If you've got a really loyal customer base, those customers will stay and try a second and maybe a third query, but that gets tiresome." According to Bettencourt, by deploying Verity technology, these same sites were able to drop this 15% to less than 1% as well as increase revenues by 25 to 30% within six months.

Verity continues to look for ways to build knowledge management solutions, including tools that will be particularly useful in large corporations with a global reach. Organization and effective query will remain important to any business, but Bettencourt believes personalizing that information and automating its discovery process are the next steps. "The ability for technology to arbitrate concepts as opposed to words, and then map concepts to other concepts and do automated discovery of that information and deliver it to users in real time will bring a lot of value and savings not only in a company's own time-to-market, but also help it to build its own community of expertise," he says.