October - 2002 - issue > Business

What does a company do when it discovers the target market upon which it originally planned to build a solid business doesn't deliver the return on investment? Change the target market! This is just what Intelliseek, a privately-owned, leading supplier of business intelligence solutions did.

MAHENDRA VORA AND SUNDAR KADAYAM founded Intelliseek in 1997, after realizing that consumers needed a better solution for information searching on the Web. With major partners like Ford Ventures and Nokia Ventures on board, the two entrepreneurs thought they couldn't fail.
With this backing, Vora and Kadayam, along with their team at Intelliseek, built a powerful desktop research tool called BullsEye, and proceeded to build a user base of three million consumers in two years.
With two versions of the product available to consumers, a free version and a more in-depth, feature-based product for sale, Vora and Kadayam soon realized was that the market had shifted: consumers expected to get search services for free. They barely managed to raise about $20,000 in revenue per month to support three million consumers.
But then they realized that there were large corporate customers with a specific need that perhaps Intelliseek's technology could fill. They began to transition the company into a business-to-business (B2B) enterprise, and that is where they found success. The basis for their success is something Vora calls “actionable intelligence.” This is based upon the premise that corporate information seekers do not even want to read documents resulting from searches to find the specific information they need. The users want something more: a search engine that finds the relevant documents and tailors the results based upon their specific needs.
This is where Intelliseek's Intelligent Agent platform comes in. Developed over four years, all Intelliseek enterprise applications are built on this scalable, XML-based, proprietary platform, which can be customized to perform specific intelligence tasks for any given enterprise. It consists of intelligent search, information filtering, text-analysis, personalized tracking, learning agents, and auto-categorization.
Intelliseek has used this platform to develop three enterprise solutions: Enterprise Search Server (ESS), ExpressFeedback and BrandPulse. ESS deploys intelligent agents to find information from distributed, heterogeneous sources, then analyzes it for relevance, auto-categorizes content, and tracks and delivers timely alerts of content changes. ESS can be used for competitive intelligence, active recruiting, consumer intelligence, real-time lead generation, and intellectual property management.
Intelliseek merged with a company called PlanetFeedback, and ExpressFeedback and BrandPulse are products that are part of the PlanetFeedback product suite. ExpressFeedback is a feedback collection and management system. A hosted application, ExpressFeedback is an online feedback form system to help businesses gain insights into their consumer, customer, and employee interactions. The ExpressFeedback product organizes and structures the feedback and dynamically serves content based on user selections during the feedback process. It then aggregates the data collected and reports it in a digital dashboard that anyone in the company can access at anytime.
BrandPulse is an “online buzz measurement” system that monitors and collects consumer feedback on a company or product from online resources such as discussion forums and USENET groups. This allows the PlanetFeedback division of Intelliseek to scour the Web and interpret the scores of consumer-to-consumer communications about a company, its products, its competition, and relevant issues.
Despite the successful transition to a B2B company, Intelliseek continues to support its consumer product lines, which include PlanetFeedback.com, BullsEye, and ProFusion.com, a consumer site that utilizes ESS capabilities to search more than 1000 search sources.
Things are going well for the company. Intelliseek now has more than 80 clients, including companies like GE, Proctor & Gamble, Nokia, Ford, Cingular, CBS, Hershey, and even the U.S. Department of Defense. The average revenue per sale is about $80,000.
Intelliseek has grown 300% in revenues each year for the past three years and is growing steadily as an enterprise software and solutions business. As Vora says, “You must be quick to change, quick to execute, and you must have your employees follow the change quickly.”