Tilos takes lead in smart enterprise suite race

The day of the traditional business application is over. Businesses no longer simply accept endless, costly customisations in the never-ending quest to gain value from software. Competitive pressures and the need to meet changing market demands instantly, are forcing companies to look for business applications that can meet their immediate needs while also being easily adaptable to future requirements.

"Traditional business applications designed according to traditional methodologies to meet traditional business requirements do not meet the demands modern companies face," says Victoria Vaksman, MD of Tilos Business Solutions. "If applications are to deliver value to customers, their architecture needs to be flexible enough to allow each company to slot the business functionality it requires into a core application with the minimum of fuss and hassle."

A broad move to this new type of application development will take time. Major vendors the world over are combining the functionality of portal, collaboration, BPM, content and document management and analytics into a single solution creating a single, integrated platform. Gartner says this combination can offer businesses much more.

"The SES is far more than simply bundling separate portal, content management and similar applications into one solution," asserts Vaksman. "The SES foundation allows business to develop a variety of business solutions using a single platform, while providing facilities to integrate almost any external, third-party application into its architecture.

"This means companies wanting to retain best-of-breed applications will be able to do so, and will be able to integrate them into the core SES foundation where data can be shared across the organisation."

According to Gartner, the SES "provides a broad foundation to support knowledge or information work within an enterprise or between groups in different enterprises and may be considered the platform for knowledge management".

Due to the customisable nature of the SES, there are no definitive components that have to be in every suite. However, Gartner points out SES solutions should include a significant combination of technologies such as these:

* Content management - including document management and Web content management, extending to digital asset management and support for rich media;

* Collaboration - including messaging, alerting, real-time application sharing, presence and threaded discussions;

* Multi-channel access - providing connectivity to a range of desktop and mobile devices via a mix of connectivity methods is supported for both content management and collaboration;

* Information retrieval - including information categorisation, taxonomy generation, profiling and expertise location;

* Expertise location and management - to dynamically profile users and facilitate access to their tacit knowledge;

* Community technology - enabling functionality for building and maintaining online communities;

* Process management - targeting not the repetitive tasks supported by traditional workflow, but the ad hoc and dynamic activities characteristic of knowledge workers; and

* Portal framework - providing a consistent user interface for business-to-employee (B2E) users (they may be employees within the enterprise or those within the extended enterprise of value chain partners).

(Source: Gartner Research, The Smart Enterprise Suite Is Coming: Do We Need It?)

Built on the Microsoft platform, the SES product offering from Tilos delivers a full, integrated collaboration and analytics suite that can incorporate other applications customers may want to use, no matter what platform they are built on. In addition, the system`s interface is not a proprietary application, but an Internet browser, allowing users access to the system from any location or device - as long as the appropriate security authorisations, provided by Tilos`s Portal, are in place.

"Many of the leading IT vendors have certain components of a complete SES offering," adds Vaksman. "Tilos, on the other hand, has all the components in its Tilos product suite. We identified a SES approach to the development of business applications and started developing the product in 1999, giving us a head start on our competitors."

The Tilos suite has been deployed successfully in various local companies covering a range of industry verticals as diverse as the financial services sector and local government. The company`s international footprint has also given its software exposure in Europe and Vaksman expects positive results there as well.

According to Gartner, SES will "replace portals and team collaboration support products as the focus of investment within a majority of enterprises by 2005 (0.7 probability)". And while the leading IT vendors focus on filling out their SES portfolio, Tilos has the core components in place to deliver new-age business applications designed to deliver the functionality customers desire without the high costs and restrictions of the past.