With Authorete From The Haley Enterprise, It Takes Only 5 People to Install Software on 35000 KPN Workstations.

Business Editors, High Tech Writers

PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 2, 2001

By mid-2001, KPN Telecom, the Dutch telecommunications giant, will install and maintain software on its 35,000 workstations automatically with an IT team of only 5 instead of the 30 people who do it now.

KPN will use Archimedes, an application that incorporates The Haley Enterprise's Authorete(TM) rules-based programming logic, to capture, manage, and automate knowledge. In the case of Archimedes, Authorete provides knowledge management and automation for software installation processes.

"Archimedes simplifies software installation so that KPN's employees will have access to up-to-date, robust applications more quickly than they do now," said Jan Veldsink, business consultant for Pecoma Informatica, the Netherlands-based IT company that developed Archimedes.

Installing new software in large organizations is a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. IT specialists analyze the new software, identify possible conflicts with existing applications and resolve them in the course of building reliable installation scripts. Resulting installation scripts are then distributed over networks managed by Tivoli and installed by utilities such as Systems Management Services (SMS) on Microsoft Windows workstations.

Pecoma is using Authorete to capture the knowledge about installation conflicts and solutions embodied in KPN documents, processes, procedures, and the IT staff's collective experience. Archimedes uses Authorete to express this knowledge as sentences that are managed in a knowledge repository. In effect, these sentences specify how IT specialists currently analyze software installations and prepare installation scripts.

Authorete makes it easy for KPN to author and refine knowledge about installing software by guiding users through a series of meaningful statements within waterfall menus. Alternatively, users can dictate sentences through the speech recognition component. Authorete uses natural language processing to understand the precise meaning of such sentences, stores their parsed structure in a robustly administrated and version-controlled knowledge base, and automatically generates software code that supports installation script construction.

"Authorete will improve KPN's IT efficiency in two ways," said Veldsink. "First, it automates processes that IT previously performed `manually.' Second, it manages the logic used to perform the analysis, so that IT doesn't have to reprogram the system every time something is modified or added."

Pecoma Informatica (www.pecoma.nl) is an information and communications technology developer headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Pecoma focuses on knowledge technology, management information systems, data mining, business intelligence and Web technology.

The Haley Enterprise (www.haley.com) is the only company that delivers software that listens to what the user says and does what its told. Haley automates the management and use of business knowledge through artificial intelligence technologies including rules-based programming, case-based reasoning, natural language processing, and speech understanding. Applications for Haley's software and technologies include customer relationship management, enterprise application integration, e-business applications such as e-sales and e-service, workflow and process automation for a broad range of industries.