DURING THE PAST two years, Intraspect has grown from being a startup vendor in the area of KM (knowledge management) to a company that today has more than 200 customers and active partnerships with Microsoft, SAS, Sun, and BEA. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Intraspect CEO Jim Pflaging and CTO Tom Gruber talk about how KM applications are evolving into critical pieces of enterprise software. InfoWorld: In this economy, why is knowledge management a priority? InfoWorld: What are customers specifically looking for in this space? Pflaging: Customers want an enterprise collaboration solution that has elements of portals, elements of team-based collaboration, and elements of knowledge management in a platform. We think the winners that are going to be standing out are going to be a broader-based platform. They are also going to have to have the ability to tightly integrate into the big line of business applications, whether that’s SAP [or] Siebel [or] what have you. InfoWorld: What differentiates Intraspect in this space? Gruber: We tie together the actual content and context level. So the place to work, the collaborative workspace, is also the space where you find out all of the information you need. Right from e-mail, you can search and bring things back in. That’s how it works. The key thing that we’ve done that I don’t think anyone else cracked is, “How do you do an enterprise-scale content repository as well as collaboration space?” Literally, we think of e-mail as a user experience for running the product. InfoWorld: How is this done? Pflaging: We built a technology that maps the e-mail, the documents, into the Oracles and Siebels all over the world. It’s called an ORM, for Object-Relational Mapping. We hired one of the world experts in that area. It handles meta data extremely well dynamically. The other thing that happens is that our UI experience is now able to do meta data-driven UIs without touching the schema. So we can have arbitrary attributes and relations on top of our object model, dynamically defined at the user interface level. InfoWorld: How hard is it to develop applications on top of this platform? Gruber: You can develop applications that are independent from the data layer so that as you roll out apps they won’t break when you roll out new releases of the platform. This was something that, when we talked to hundreds of people who were Lotus users, [we found they] were frustrated [about]. [If] a new version of Lotus breaks the apps, I have to start over. We solved that problem. The second thing we did was to make it very simple to build apps. In this new collaborative app framework that we’ve rolled out, we’ve taken the complexity of building Intraspect apps down to an entry-level Web developer. In our previous generation of software, you needed to be pretty sophisticated. InfoWorld: What is the relationship between a company like yours and the current generation of portal offerings? Pflaging: People have realized [that] the next generation of portals [has] to have a rich collaborative and KM component. And what most vendors are realizing [is] it’s easier to partner than to try to build that. We have partnerships in the portal area with BEA, with Epicentric, with AGruber. We’ve also got deals with Microsoft SharePoint and we’ve done a number of customer integrations with Plumtree. In the CRM area, we have partnerships with Onyx [and] we have partnerships with SAS Institute. A number of our customers have integrated us with Siebel. And just recently, we’ve announced this week a new partnership with Groove. The Groove deal brings us much closer to Microsoft was well. InfoWorld: How important will these knowledge management applications be in the wake of the events surrounding Sept. 11? Pflaging: As people look for different ways to do business — other than jump on a plane — applications like Intraspect are going to be top-of-mind for people. I think anyone in this collaboration space is going to be a net beneficiary because there is heightened awareness of finding creative ways to do work. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business