[Marketing & Sales/Business Development]
Who's Hot: Intelliseek, Inc.
Hed: New Uses for Old Products
Deck: When your clients for a product are going out of business, are there ways to better
use that product?
Summary: Intelliseek's technology searches intranets, bulletin boards and many other
Internet entities to allow user companies to gather news, rumors and consumer feedback
on their own products and their competition's.
Pull quote: "There is so much information on the Internet, and so many consumers
reading it, that it is crucial for companies to know what is being discussed about their
products online." -- Mahendra Vora, president and CEO, Intelliseek
When Cincinnati's Intelliseek released its new Corporate Intelligence Service (CIS)
in the fourth quarter of 2000, it turned a ho-hum search engine into an online
monitoring service that lets companies gather, categorize and analyze data located
virtually anywhere on the Internet.
Thanks to CIS, smaller companies can now afford significant market research at
relatively little cost. "If you were even a mid-sized company, you couldn't afford market
research like the Procter & Gambles of the world," says Intelliseek's CEO Mahendra
Vora. But now you can not only afford it, but you can have it delivered in just days.
A perfect application for the new technology, according to Vora, would have been
the public relations nightmare that hit Ford Motor and Bridgestone/Firestone last
year. Vora claims his product could have told those companies that problems were
on the horizon six months before the bad news hit the mainstream media. "There is
so much information on the Internet . It is crucial for companies to know what is
being discussed about their products online," he says.
Intelliseek claims it is working with another major auto maker to cut down on lost time
spent in market research. By the time auto makers gather consumer feedback, they
miss a production cycle during which changes can be made. "Imagine the
competitiveness of being able to implement changes, based on what consumers are
saying, for the very next production cycle."
Half a million new consumer messages are added to discussion groups and bulletin
boards every day, many in the form of product complaints, says Vora. "Many consumers
rely on what they read on the Internet as their primary source for purchase decisions."
Companies can use CIS to gather this consumer feedback on the Web, as well as to
identify rumors, consumer needs and product ideas, both on their own products and
the competition's.
A top automaker is using CIS for several of its major brands. "Using CIS, this client
has learned that buyers still identified their brand as an 'old people's car,' while the
competition had effectively changed its image," says Vora. "Moreover, the client is
learning how they rate against competitors regarding features like interior, exterior
and brakes."
While competing CI products can also collect data from bulletin boards and
discussion groups, Intelliseek's specialty is making sense of that data.
Combining Technologies For Greater Viability
One important part of CIS emerged from Intelliseek's April 2000 acquisition of
ProFusion.com, an Internet search-solution company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
ProFusion had developed a search service which automatically categorized and sorted
information into specified groups -- technology that is now a key feature of CIS.
Vora says the benefit is that collected search results are categorized into "buckets"
of meaningful information. "For example, if you search for 'apple,' the results can
be categorized as a food, software company, etc."
Intelliseek combined this new "auto categorization" technology with its own searchengine software, called BullsEye, to come up with today's CIS. BullsEye had been
holding its own, but given the instability of many of its Web clients, and the difficulty in
finding market share in the highly competitive search engine market, Intelliseek needed a
new niche.
"BullsEye gave people lots of information, but unstructured information," says Vora.
"Taking the power of BullsEye and combining it with the auto-categorization capability
of ProFusion, a company can get actionable data on products, brands, general market
trends, just about anything."
A process that used to be very inefficient can now be done for one-tenth the time and
money, says Vora. "Large companies conducting traditional market intelligence, with
focus groups, surveys and phone interviews, can take six months and millions of dollars,"
he says. "Our client can find out the opinions of 40,000 consumers in just two days."
Intelliseek is already beginning to see positive results with the help of its new offering,
expecting to take in nearly five times its 2000 revenue this year. Vora bases these
estimates on a significant increase in customers, the traction of first quarter 2001
sales leads and other factors.
Intelliseek generates its revenues in several ways. Typically, monthly recurring fees
of about $2,500 are added to a one-time setup fee ranging from $5,000 to $15,000.
These prices vary greatly, says Vora, depending on the tracking parameters requested by
each client. "Sometimes customers hire us to do one time research for a particular product
or brand, and ask us to collect 10,000-20,000 user messages and provide answers to their
specific questions for as little as $10,000."
And what if there are not 10,000 user messages out there in cyberspace to collect?
Vora says, "We first ensure that there is a critical mass of messages to provide the
insights our customer wants before we sign them up for the project."
On average, says Vora, customers will pay approximately $30,000 to $40,000 per
year. A "LITE" version of CIS, available at a substantially lower price, is in the
works for smaller clients. Vora would not disclose the company's revenue figures, due
to pending talks with prospective partners and key clients.
Long Road Ahead for Competitive Intelligence
Vora says CIS is the only product offering a comprehensive package of data
retrieval technologies, including the collection of information from disparate
sources, auto categorization and delivery of information that is immediately usable
by PR professionals, brand managers and product developers. He says that while
competitors like OPION and CyberAlert may have pieces of what CIS offers,
Intelliseek's is a more well rounded package.
But experts in the competitive intelligence arena are not totally convinced by Intelliseek
-- or any other CI developer for that matter.
Fuld & Co. of Cambridge, Mass., is a full-service business intelligence firm that makes a
habit of scrutinizing the claims of CI products. In its recently released "Intelligence
Software Report 2000," Fuld reviewed dozens of CI software packages, including
Intelliseek's Corporate Intelligence Service.
According to the Fuld report, Intelliseek collects only published information,
disregarding primary source data such as personal consumer interviews and surveys. Jean
Carmichael, associate director of Fuld's consulting practice, adds that Intelliseek's service
does not have the breadth of features that other packages offer such as planning and indepth analysis of collected data.
Vora says that since the Fuld report, Intelliseek has improved on several of its
identifiable flaws. "In version 2.0 we are focused on in-depth, drill down analysis
factor by factor and 100% actionable reports," says Vora, adding that upcoming
versions of CIS will address other concerns.
Carmichael claims that while no single CI vendor offers a true "do-it-all" solution,
each offers combinations of the many intelligence capabilities. Currently, clients
simply purchase the CI product that fits their particular needs, she says. "The
software industry is a long way from delivering a satisfying competitive intelligence
solution," says Carmichael.
The Power of Immediate Knowledge
Meanwhile, businesses are using products like Intelliseek's to make sense of the vast
amount of information on the Web -- and stay ahead of the competition.
One company that has been using Intelliseek's CIS to compete in the B2B integration
marketplace is Vinimaya, of Tarrytown, N.Y., a provider of e-procurement platforms,
B2B directories and other advanced B2B e-commerce tools. "We looked at other
solutions but we couldn't find anything that offered what CIS gives us," says
Vinimaya CEO Somesh Nigam. "We can now check B2B discussion boards, then
auto categorize and quantify the information we find.
"Vinimaya uses CIS to track new developments and monitor our competition's activities
in the area of e-procurement in general and B2B supplier integration," says Nigam. CIS
has helped his company discover trends in their industry months before the same
information is publicized in trade press. "I cannot yet translate the return on
investment in dollar terms, but I can say that CIS has allowed us to generate 30 to
40 percent of all our new leads," adds Nigam.
Another client, e-business integrator Bridgelogix Corp. of Tulsa, Okla., is using CIS to
keep track of information about itself, its competitors, relevant technologies and above
all, the needs of the customer. President and CEO Koty Krishna says, "With
Intelliseek's product we find and keep track of everything: new products and
technology in our space, specific trends and technologies for eProcurement and new
leads for our services. Being a mid-sized company, we could never afford this sort of
market intelligence through traditional vehicles."
Bridgelogix has already implemented changes based on data retrieved through CIS.
"We introduced a new connectivity product into the market when we learned that
customers were dissatisfied with existing players. And since we learned the reasons
for customer dissatisfaction, we addressed this in our product. The results are
impressive, we've already won couple of major accounts."
The Fuld report praised these "consumer intelligence" features for the information
they provide about one's competitors, but also for the reputation-saving information
they can provide a business. Fuld's Carmichael recalls that in one case someone on a
pet-related bulletin board claimed that a pet was killed by Procter & Gamble's fabric
deodorizer Febreze. "This rumor spread like wildfire, and pretty soon P&G had to launch
a huge PR campaign to nullify these rumors," Carmichael says. "CIS could have helped
identify this rumor earlier than would have otherwise been possible."
At A Glance
Name: Intelliseek, Inc.
URL: www.intelliseek.com
Location: Cincinnati
Founder: Mahendra Vora
Founded: 1997
Industry: Internet infrastructure
Employees: 35
Revenues: Undisclosed
Related Links
<a href="http://www.intelliseek.com">Intelliseek</a>
<a href="http://www.profusion.com">ProFusion.com</a>
<a href="http://www.fuld.com">Fuld & Company</a>
<a href="http://www.vinimaya.com">Vinimaya</a>
<a href="http://www.bridgelogix.com">Bridgelogix</a>
<a href="http://www.opion.com">OPION, Inc.</a>
<a href="http://www.cyberalert.com">CyberAlert, Inc.</a>
Sources
Mahendra Vora
Intelliseek Inc.
One Crowne Point Ct., Ste. 470
Cincinnati, OH 45241
Tel: (513) 772-6900
E-mail: mvora@intelliseek.com
Katharine Delahaye Paine
Delahaye Medialink Worldwide Inc.
117 Bow St.
Portsmouth, NH 03801
Tel: (603) 431-0111
E-mail: kpaine@delahayemedialink.com
Jean Carmichael
Fuld & Company, Inc.
126 Charles St.
Cambridge, MA 02141
Tel: (617) 492-5900
E-mail: jcarmichael@fuld.com
Somesh Nigam
Vinimaya Inc.
155 White Plains Rd., Ste. 203
Tarrytown, NY 10591
Tel: (914) 524-0967
E-mail: scnigam@vinimaya.com
Koty Krishna
Bridgelogix Corp.
9717 E. 42nd Street, Ste.100
Tulsa, OK 74146-3613
Tel: (918) 280-5555
E-mail: kkrishna@bridgelogix.com