Ultra Knowledge was set up in November 2002. The initial three years were mostly taken up with competitive analysis and core software design, build and testing. We had already decided that we wanted to build not just a search engine but a completely new approach to handling unstructured Web content. The significant difference in our approach was that we wanted to design a ‘user-centric’ system rather than let tradition and hardware limitations dictate what we could offer our prospective customers. This required a great deal of experimentation, testing and re-coding to produce not just the core engine but also enable effective integration into easily managed data workflows.
The ‘Guinea Pig’ years!
Our first client was Metro Belgium. The largest free newspaper in Belgium wanted to change its website from a PDF of yesterday’s paper into a destination site for news and lifestyle content in Dutch, French and English. Not only was this a great test for our engine to deliver real-time content but it was an opportunity to prove its multi-lingual capabilities.
Our first major client was Cnet Networks UK. We worked with Cnet’s three main sites (Cnet.co.uk, Zdnet.co.uk and Silicon.com) for three years until CBS Media acquired Cnet in 2007-8. Our relationship ended for two reasons, CBS had global licence deals with their established software partners and they would not consider moving to a SaaS delivery model in place of a traditional software licensing deal.
The transition to SaaS
Our early-adopter relationships helped Ultra Knowledge realise that it had to make a significant change to its go-to-market strategy. Traditional deployment of complex software under a licence deal forced clients to commit to an up front payment of substantial licence fees and take on the development of in-house application ‘know-how’ resources and manage increasing hardware infrastructure demands.
Economic conditions were exacerbating the squeeze on budgets post-dotcom and it became evident that ‘Software as a Service’ was a much more attractive option. As a result Ultra Knowledge spent 2008 developing and testing the delivery of our Technology Platform as a hosted, managed set of services.
The first two implementations of the SaaS model were on Trendhunter.com and Metro.co.uk. Implementation took only five weeks and positive uplift in traffic metrics began in the first week of operation.
The relationship between social media, quality content and marketing
There are several books written, being written and being researched that attempt to explain the importance of social, content and marketing as separate subjects. Commendable efforts but the real story is about the common threads in these subjects. The real change comes down to the Web-consumer becoming the most powerful player in the game. The ‘user-centric’ focus of the online world is the most significant impact on how online business methods have and will continue to change.
It is for this reason that Ultra Knowledge has focused on developing a range of interrelated social, content and marketing services in a Platform that makes their adoption viable. It is why we position ourselves as a Strategic Technology Partner. Massive change has taken place and it would be naive to pretend that this is going to stop.