InQuira Gets Serious About Web 2.0

InQuira, a provider of integrated software applications, today released InQuira 8, the latest version of the company's integrated search and knowledge management solution. Following the release of InQuira 7.3 in May 2006, this new product extends InQuira's forward-looking methodology. InQuira 8 features support and analysis tools for Web 2.0, including new technologies that power and analyze content from user communities. The release represents the first stage of InQuira's product plan to develop industry specific knowledge base solutions, according to the company. "We've been building out this bigger platform and integrating the components more tightly," says Tim Shetler, vice president of marketing at InQuira. "Starting the year delivering a major release is the culmination of a lot of those efforts in terms of creating a tighter integration between the search and the information manager products." John Ragsdale, vice president of research at Service & Support Professionals Association says that the amalgamation of service offerings in what he calls "a Web 2.0 package" gives InQuira an edge in the Web-support services market. "If you're just buying everything one piece at a time, it doesn't naturally fit together well. The power of this product is it's giving you a vision of how everything can fit together," he says. For InQuira's new Web support application Information Center 8, the company tied together products to support both Web self-service and the call center, an integration that InQuira noticed many of its customers attempting to build on their own. The release also includes InQuira Discussion Forums, a tool for customers to collaborate via online communities and leverage information from these interactions. The new InQuira Information Manager helps to improve user subscriptions and authoring processes for user communities, while InQuira Analytics helps to dig useful content and analysis from them. According to Ragsdale, the new Web 2.0 capabilities will help companies that are still confused by what Web 2.0 means and how they can find value in it. As a rapidly growing company (it experienced growth of 60 percent in 2006), InQuira stands to see a larger boost not only from new product offerings, but also from consolidation within the knowledge management market. Ragsdale says that with M2M's recent acquisition of Knova, InQuira is now the last standalone vendor specializing in both search and forum capabilities. "I imagine we will see some great possible partnerships and some suitors looking to add this to their portfolio. It's probably going to be a dramatic year for this company." Related articles: KANA Leads Forrester's E-Service Suite Wave E-Service Providers Ride the Forrester Wave ABG Scores Web Self-Service Vendors

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