Knosys Seeks Clarity With A Name Change

Event Summary

Knosys, Inc. has announced that it has changed its company name to ProClarity Corporation. The goal of the name change is to leverage the strength of the ProClarity product line and to align its corporate and product brand identities. ProClarity Corporation stated that it "will continue to empower companies to increase efficiency and effectiveness by providing a platform for delivering tailored, Internet-enabled analytic applications for the enterprise".

"Effectively we are leveraging the success of the ProClarity product line," said Bob Lokken, president and CEO of ProClarity Corporation. "With over 250 corporate customers and 30 independent software vendors using ProClarity products today, we felt it was a good time to capitalize on the momentum of our award-winning product family."

In a separate statement, the company also announced the launch of the ProClarity 4.0 product family, which includes an enterprise server to enable centralized management and thin client accessibility. The ProClarity Analytic Platform is a web-enabled, component-based platform for developing and deploying enterprise-wide, custom analytic applications and includes: a middle-tier server to enable centralized management and zero-footprint, thin-client accessibility; a full-powered desktop client; powerful and embeddable analytic components; and Software Development Kits (SDK) for the entire product line. According to the vendor, the ProClarity Analytic Platform 4.0 is the first complete web-enabled, customizable analytic application platform built specifically for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services.

Market Impact

A corporate name change doesn't usually inspire much interest, but in this case, the increased clarity (please excuse the pun) of the company name and its new alignment with its flagship product should ease the life of prospective customers and the vendor's pre-sales and sales staff.

We hope that ProClarity is quick to implement the change and make sure it is reflected in all of their marketing collateral, web site presences, etc. Seagate Software changed its name to Crystal Decisions (for reasons similar to Knosys'), and is still struggling to get the new name reflected everywhere. If you are going to make a move like this, do it fast and get on to revenue generating items.

The concurrent announcement of ProClarity 4.0's release should help. In addition to the increased visibility the product name will receive in the press, the latest version has enhancements that customers have been requesting. ProClarity has been well received, and has OEM customers such as Great Plains, Manugistics, and WebTrends. Companies using ProClarity include AT&T, Hewlett Packard, Nabisco, and Pfizer.

User Recommendations

Customers evaluating analytic applications should consider the ProClarity Analytic Platform 4.0. ProClarity has scored some impressive wins lately, and is now being considered a serious contender in this market. The addition of a "middle tier" management server increases options for management, fault tolerance, and high availability. The middle tier runs on the same machine as the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) being used by the application.

Customers will however be limited to Microsoft as the choice of analytic platform. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 must be purchased (but not necessarily installed), since ProClarity uses Microsoft Analysis Services, which comes bundled with SQL Server 2000. Any data source may be used to build the OLAP cubes. In addition, the product is implemented using the Component Object Model (COM, a proprietary Microsoft architecture and competitor to the Object Management Group's industry-standard CORBA). In many cases this will not be an issue since Microsoft Windows is ubiquitous throughout IT environments worldwide. ProClarity has indicated that it will implement Microsoft's .NET architecture going forward. .NET is something of a competitor to Java, and is still in its infancy at this time.