KnowledgeTree Relies on rPath's Technology to Expand Marketplace

June 13, 2007; 03:30 AM
KnowledgeTree™, the world’s leading Open Source document management system for small to medium-sized organizations, has selected rPath’s™ rBuilder and the rPath Appliance Platform™ to help deliver its solution to customers as a software appliance.

rPath is the provider of the first platform for creating and maintaining software and virtual appliances. The software appliance approach allows KnowledgeTree’s customers to easily install and maintain the company’s applications, without requiring specific in-house expertise – a benefit especially attractive to the company’s small-to-medium business (SMB) customers. Moving to a software appliance delivery model enables KnowledgeTree to reduce potential integration issues for these customers, dramatically decreasing the total cost of ownership and associated support costs.

“Because the software appliance approach eliminates customer hassles associated with owning an application, KnowledgeTree can spend less time supporting the product and more time developing value-added features,” said Billy Marshall, CEO and founder of Path. “As a result, KnowledgeTree customers receive a better overall experience from a higher quality product.”

KnowledgeTree expects to release a beta version mid-year 2007 “Delivering our offering as a software appliance is an excellent way to simplify and make it more attractive to smaller companies who may not want, or have the capability, to manage a platform and operating system,” stated KnowledgeTree COO Daniel Chalef. “KnowledgeTree, with its strong focus on ease of use, is a leading commercial open source document management application in the SMB and departmental space. Business managers in smaller organizations are looking for the least possible complexity in their chosen technology combined with hassle-free deployment. Working with rPath has helped us to deliver that level of ease to our customers.”

KnowledgeTree is also using rPath technology to attract and engage original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners. Using the software appliance approach, it is simple for an OEM to ship co-branded document management systems that are easily installed at customer sites as a hardware appliance.

Chalef commented, “We are truly impressed with the engineering that went into this elegant technology. Our experience with rPath to date has been uniformly positive, and we are incredibly happy with the professionalism of the team. We are confident that this partnership will take us to the next level in our growth into new markets.”

About rPath

rPath's rBuilder™ and the rPath™ Appliance Platform transform applications into software appliances. Software appliances simplify server applications by eliminating the hassles of installation, configuration and maintenance. Software vendors can expand their markets, grow distribution channels and reduce development and support costs by delivering their applications as software appliances. Appliance customers can eliminate complex application environments and consolidate multiple maintenance streams. rPath enables developers to create appliances in multiple formats, including all major virtual machine formats and rPath is the only provider to support the full appliance life cycle with field update capability. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, visit www.rpath.com.

About KnowledgeTree

KnowledgeTree's vision is to make document management simple. The web-based and AJAX-enabled application is built on the popular open source LAMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack. KnowledgeTree has significant open source community traction and has been downloaded more than 300 000 times to date. It is the leading commercial open source document management system designed for the SMB and departmental user.

KnowledgeTree is available in three editions: KnowledgeTree Enterprise, KnowledgeTree SMB and KnowledgeTree Open Source. The commercial editions of KnowledgeTree are sold with access to priority support and offer additional functionality that provides a familiar Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office interface into the document repository and direct-to-repository scanning capability. For more information, visit www.knowledgetree.com.