I had a chance to sit down with David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Software, Palo Alto, on Sunday afternoon, before PC Forum really got going, to learn a little about a new web service he would be debuting later at the event, called “Illumio.” I think it was the coolest stealth company to come out at PC Forum (actually, Illumio is not a company, but a project within an existing company). Tacit, founded in 1997, produces software to enable collaboration among employees in large enterprises. For a refresher on what the term “tacit knowledge” means, see this Wikipedia page. Customers include Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Government, and its partners are IBM, SAIC, and Sun. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Woodside Fund, RBC Technology Ventures, Alta Partners, Reuters Venture Capital, and In-Q-Tel. Gilmour described Illumio as “a Web 2.0 way to extend Tacit software” What it will do (a public beta starts soon, per the signup at www.illumio.com) is allow any individual to search their network of colleagues, and tap into their knowledge for “what they know, what they have, and who they know.” Tacit’s patented software technology continuously processes e-mail, documents, and other business communications and automatically discovers each employee’s work focus, expertise, and business relationships.

The Illumio project started, said Gilmour, as a way to get smaller companies to take advantage of Tacit’s software technology — that is, customers that couldn’t afford either the cost or the time for a full software deployment, which can takes months. The Illumio version of the software, a web service, will be free initially, Gimour said. “Tacit and Illumio are more about collaboration as opposed to knowledge management. It’s what we call ‘massively federated desktop search’,” Gilmour explained. “We enable you to search your colleagues, and interact in new ways.” Later, in the company presentations session on Monday afternoon, CEO Gilmour spoke of the ready market for Illumio: “There will be something like 50 million desktop search engines by the end of 2006, and there will be zero PCs without desktop search after the next OS generation.” He said his company’s Illumio technology now supports Google and MSN desktop search, and others will follow. It searches files, documents, email, contacts, favorites, browser cache, appointments, and more. He allowed, however, that a problem with desktop search is privacy. “The market is hyper-sensitive about that,” and he said his company works hard on it.

The Illumio web service “gets you information you can’t find anywhere else,” said Gilmour. He explained that, once the service is ready for public beta (still not as of today), it will be a 2.5 Mb download (Windows only at first), which then sits on top of your desktop search engine. “The service doesn’t know who matches a request until someone opts in to the request,” he said. Illumio has an IM-like feature, and no peer-to-peer connection. “Everything is done through SOAP on the server, with tiny XML documents.”

Gilmour gave some examples of how the Illumio service would work. The first was a “Document Request.” For example, “Who has the latest Gartner presentation on social networking”? A message would pop up on the desktop of your network connections as a small window, said Gilmour, and the receiver does not have to search through his disk. “There’s even a time estimate displayed for you on how long all the contacts’ computers will take to respond to the request,” he said.

Another example he gave was a request called “Get an Answer.” Gilmour said this is handled by the declining Dutch auction method, in which “the bar will be lowered if there’s no answer, till one comes in.” Another type of request, which uses the software’s “Personal Groups” feature, allows one to search for someone that knows a certain person. For example, he said — in the case of “Who knows Esther?” — the software would search for who did the most email with her.

The company’s vision with Illumio is “How can social networks be put to use for people,” said Gilmour. “It lets you search your friends and colleagues for what they alone can offer you. And, when you have something they want, it puts you in control of that and ensures your privacy.” The web service will also have a feature called “Shared Illumio Groups,” which a user will be able to set up at the Illumio site, and these can be either “Public” or “Managed.”

Audience questions afterwards (it was a well attended and attentive session) included the following. Q: How will you stop scurilous uses? A: We’re very concerned. We don’t know yet, and will write the rules as we need them. Q: Will you partner with commerce sites? A: There is the possibility of buying and selling things with this technology. Q: What about competitors? A: Others that have tried to do something similar have required the user to write their own profile, but that’s not a reliable technique.

Tag: PCforum06
Tag: PCforum