It’s
no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of
the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven
superheroes. If you've seen the recent
Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in
Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one
of the movies.
Yeah, we’re
fans. Especially as Iron Man is a
regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes
need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation.
Oracle
certainly has its share of advanced technology.
For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the
company advance the science of Knowledge Management. And it was some extremely super
technology. At that time, Forrester’s
Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is
Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via
web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for
industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products,
and solutions.’ One short sentence that
amounts to a very tall order.
Since the
acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle
announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of
InQuira: Oracle
Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we
still have bad guys to fight. And we are
very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans.
So
what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist
would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster.
First, we
gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart:
Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle
WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database
Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
Huge scaling and performance improvements.
Then we gave
it a better reach:
Improved iConnect functionality that delivers
contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications.
Better content acquisition support across disparate
sources.
Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language
search support for 16 Languages.
Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages,
as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14
languages.
And finally we
made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter:
Improved
Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands
the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers.
AnswerFlow
for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided
troubleshooting and answer delivery.
Knowledge
Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Knowledge
Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted,
actionable insights.
A
new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides
an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint.
We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5
is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very
hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees
with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree
it’s a suit worth wearing.
We are
continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially
relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced
wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time
analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management
is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers,
to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today
cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships
or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation
to build from.
And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to
being finished. Next we are taking Oracle
Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re
thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure…
By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011.
