Kanisa Ships Version 5.5 of Market Leading Suite of Knowledge-Empowered Customer Service Applications.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

HDI 2004

Booth No. 112

CUPERTINO, Calif. & ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 19, 2004

Kanisa5.5 Features Best-in-Class Analytics, Enhanced

NLP Search from Acquisition of Ask Jeeves Enterprise

Search Application, and Seamless CRM Integration

Kanisa Inc., the leading provider of knowledge-empowered customer service applications, announced the general availability of Kanisa5.5, the company's enhanced application suite for automating the service resolution process across all channels. Unveiled at the Help Desk Institute conference in Orlando, Florida, Kanisa5.5 uses next generation knowledge management technology to improve service delivery in contact centers and on self-service websites.

Significant new functionality in version 5.5 includes groundbreaking analytics, increased scalability and internationalization, enhanced natural language processing, and seamless CRM integration. With the Kanisa5.5 application suite, customer service organizations can now dynamically integrate knowledge management with CRM to increase first call resolution, drive effective self-service, analyze root causes, and improve customer satisfaction.

"AFC has a broad customer base, ranging from rural independent telephone companies to the nation's largest regional Bells. So, support calls can be time-intensive and require highly-skilled analysts to resolve a wide range of complex issues," commented Mike Drennan, director of customer support at Petaluma, Calif.-based AFC, a leading developer of broadband access solutions for the global telecommunications industry. "Our deployment of Kanisa5.5 has enabled the company to increase call resolution at our frontline support tier by over 400 percent. Prior to Kanisa, our resolution rate at our frontline was under five percent. In just over a month of using Kanisa5.5, our frontline resolution rate has achieved a 4x increase to over 25 percent."

"Kanisa represented a significant improvement over our legacy knowledge base, with automated content integration and intuitive authoring, superior self-service, deep CRM integration, and more complete resolution functionality for agents," said Kenny Bunnell, program manager of technical services at Novell. "We look forward to Version 5.5 further extending Kanisa's clear product leadership with enhanced resolution analytics and enterprise-class scalability. With Kanisa and Siebel, our two-vendor support strategy is delivering tremendous value for Novell and our customers."

Best-in-Class Resolution Analytics

Kanisa5.5 delivers unmatched analytic reporting -- superior to that offered by legacy knowledge base tools. New features include:

-- Packaged reports for content managers such as knowledge gaps,

document effectiveness, and authoring quality

-- Packaged reports for support managers such as product incident

breakdown, query and topic ranks, collaboration traffic, and

business process analysis

-- Packaged reports for administrators such as incident coverage

and search traffic

-- Reporting dashboards with consolidated analytics for business

managers, product managers and administrators

-- A new data mart architecture featuring a documented analytic

data model and robust ad hoc reporting

-- External data feed for integration with external data marts

and data warehouses

Seamless Integration with CRM Applications for Context-Driven Workflow

Unlike traditional knowledge bases, Kanisa deeply integrates with CRM and enterprise applications to uniquely leverage case and customer data to drive context-based resolution workflow. While legacy knowledge base vendors rely on proprietary API's, Kanisa embeds standards-based webMethods Application Integration Adapters, ensuring certified integration with leading enterprise applications, including:

-- Siebel

-- AmdocsClarify

-- PeopleSoft

-- Vantive

-- Oracle

-- SAP

-- Baan

-- JDE 

-- BroadVision

-- Additional packaged and custom applications are supported by

webMethods EAI toolkit

Enhanced Natural Language Processing (NLP)

With version 5.5, Kanisa has completed the integration of the JeevesOne NLP search engine, acquired as part of the purchase of Jeeves Solutions, Ask Jeeves' enterprise software division, in July 2003. These NLP enhancements benefit all Kanisa applications with features including:

-- Multi-lingual tokenization, stemming and spell correction

-- Term understanding via support for adjacent and non-adjacent

multi-word phrasing and synonyms

-- Syntax and semantic understanding via grammatical matching of

verbs and objects to taxonomy elements

-- Document context understanding via topic spotting, automated

tagging of meta-data and document region awareness

-- Query intent understanding, via context analysis and

request-result matching

-- Improved result relevance via usage-driven machine learning

engine

-- Query mapping to business goals based on context engine that

drives cross-sell, up-sell and personalization

Enterprise-Class Scalability and Internationalization

Kanisa5.5 also features further improvements to Kanisa's industry-leading scalability and international language support, already evidenced by Kanisa's large, global customers such Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Apple, and eBay. Enhancements include:

-- New federated architecture supports millions of documents and

rapid query response times

-- Stemming, parsing, auto-categorization and information

retrieval in 22 languages, including English, Spanish, French,

German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Dutch,

Italian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese,

Romanian, and others

"Kanisa5.5 is a landmark release that further extends Kanisa's technology and product leadership over traditional knowledge bases and search tools," said Bruce Armstrong, president and CEO of Kanisa. "We set high goals for ourselves with this release in the areas of analytics, scalability and integration, and we have exceeded all of them. I am pleased that Kanisa5.5 is already providing such exceptional value to our customers."

Kanisa will be demonstrating the Kanisa 5.5 at the Help Desk Institute 2004 Annual Conference and Expo, April 18-20, 2004 Booth #112.

About Kanisa5

Kanisa5 is a complete suite of knowledge-empowered customer service applications that automate the service resolution process and make it easy for customers to find information. Kanisa5 includes the following applications:

-- Kanisa Support Center: helps support analysts with each step

of the resolution process

-- Kanisa Support Site: empowers customers with knowledge to help

them avoid and solve problems themselves

-- Kanisa Expert Forums: enables customers to help each other

while providing the support team with valuable feedback

-- Kanisa Site Search: understands customers in their own words

to guide them to the most appropriate knowledge resources

-- K5 Knowledge Management Platform: integrates and auto-tags

disparate sources of content critical to customer service and

support

About Kanisa

Kanisa is the leading provider of knowledge-empowered customer service applications that drive efficiency, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Kanisa applies knowledge to optimize customer-facing business processes in support centers, service portals, and web sites. Industry-leaders including Microsoft, HP, Apple Computer, Ford, and Novartis rely on Kanisa applications to deliver world-class customer service. Kanisa is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif.