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Tag: knowledge management systems

  • Kovai.co – Multi-Product Enterprise SAAS Startup for All Business Needs

    The effects of global pandemic has significant impact on several industries including the technology and software sector. But, it did not slow down growth in the software sector. The growth of enterprise software and SAAS products has been quite good. The expenditure of Information Technology on enterprise software is estimated to reach 672 billion USD in 2022. The Enterprise Software Market is forecast to reach $545m by 2025. SaaS products and enterprise software have become essential in a cutthroat business environment. They provide accessibility, functionality, scalability, and versatility to businesses. Kovai.co is a multi-product company that has a global reach in more than 70 countries. Read to know about Kovai.co products, founders, business model, marketing, and the complete journey of its growth.

    Kovai.co – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Kovai.co
    Headquarters London
    Industry Enterprise Software & SaaS
    Founder Saravana Kumar
    Founded 2011
    Website kovai.co

    Kovai.co – About
    Kovai.co – Founder and Team
    Kovai.co – The Idea and Startup Story
    Kovai.co – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Kovai.co – Products
    Kovai.co – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Kovai.co – Customer Acquisition
    Kovai.co – Challenges Faced
    Kovai.co – Marketing
    Kovai.co – Growth
    Kovai.co – Acquisitions
    Kovai.co – Competitors
    Kovai.co – Tools Used to Run The Startups
    Kovai.co – Recognition and Achievements

    Kovai.co – About

    Kovai.co is a bootstrapped & profitable multi-product enterprise SaaS company specializing in enterprise integration and knowledge management space based out of Coimbatore, India and London, UK. Kovai.co is a technology partner of choice for many of the world’s leading enterprises to manage and monitor their Microsoft BizTalk and Azure Serverless environments. Kovai.co’s product team consists of thinkers and innovators who are re-defining the way robust Enterprise Software and SaaS products are built.

    Their mission is to create a successful global technology product company out of their home city – Coimbatore. Their vision is to be a SaaS Unicorn within 2030.

    The core value of the company is #TogetherWeGrow. They identify necessities and create opportunities. Enjoy their growth in all aspects and continue the journey to scale.

    Kovai.co – Founder and Team

    Saravana Kumar is the sole founder of Kovai.co ably supported by a leadership team of experts from various domains. The current team size is 240+. They coach and empower people thereby enhancing their performance. They are against command and control. All their leaders are friendly and approachable. They believe in doing the tasks first, get mature, then delegating, and elevate.

    Kovai.co has its offices in London, UK and Coimbatore, India. Saravana Kumar is born and brought up in Coimbatore. He chose to give back to his hometown through his contributions on economic and skills upliftment. Kovai.co under his dynamic leadership has grown organically from a single product to multi product company with over 240 employees majority of them based out of Coimbatore. The company is bootstrapped and has crossed $10 MN ARR in 2020.

    Kovai.co gives opportunities to freshers and expats who wish to come back closer to their hometown. For freshers there is a Kovai.co Connect initiative where in students from different educational institutions are hired as interns and given in-depth classroom & on the job training for a period of 6 months after which they are taken on rolls as full-time employees. Over the last two years the company has trained nearly 100 students under this initiative.

    Kovai.co – The Idea and Startup Story

    Saravana Kumar, Founder & CEO, Kovai.co was a Microsoft BizTalk Server Consultant for 10 years and during that time of building solutions for all their clients, he noticed there were some gaps in the BizTalk Server. He started off by building a solution to fill these gaps more as a passion in the year 2010. He presented the first version of the product to his peers at the MVP conference in the US and received very positive feedback. With the kind of positive feedback, he realized the importance of this solution in the commercial sense and decided to launch as a business. Within the first 2 months he was able to get his first customer all the way from Hongkong with whom he did not have any prior connection. Within the first three years of the launch, he was able to get about 150 customers and hence decided to go into the business full time & hire a team. Until the first three years he was running the company with a small 4-member team from the living room of his residence.

    As the product started to grow both technically and commercially, he built & launched their second product Serverless 360 for managing the Azure platform in the year 2016.

    Sometime in the year 2017 when the team was looking for a knowledge base solution to write and organize all their technical product documentation, they realized that there was not any suitable solution in the market to fit their needs and the ones that were there was very expensive. Thus, Saravana brainstormed with the team and decided to build a solution to solve this business problem there by launching their knowledge base solution Document360 in the year 2018.

    Document360 is a knowledge base platform that is engineered for growing companies. It helps companies to instantly create an online self-service knowledge base for their customers or employees accessed either publicly or privately.

    When the company was growing organically and the opportunity came to set up an engineering & marketing development center in India, back in 2013, Saravana ignored all the counsel from his peers to set up the facility in Bengaluru, Chennai or Hyderabad and started the office in Coimbatore.

    The town Coimbatore was called Kovanputhur (pre independence days) with a shorter version called Kovai. The use of the word Kovai for Coimbatore is still in existence, and it has an emotional attachment to people of Coimbatore.

    Hence when Saravana started the company, he registered the company name as “Kovai Limited” in the UK (in 2009) and “Kovai Systems India Pvt Limited” in India (in 2013). Even though the registered names were Kovai, the company was known as BizTalk360 (the first product) for a long time.

    When the company was going through the re-branding exercise after evolving into a multi-product company, they decided to bring Kovai as the prominent brand name.

    In 2018, they called the company Kovai.co.

    In 2020, with continuous persistence, they managed to acquire the domain Kovai.com owned by its previous owner for nearly 20 years.

    Their mission is to create a successful global technology product company out of their home city – Coimbatore.”

    Kovai.co – Products

    Kovai.co is a multi-product company with 4 different products and over 2000 customers spread across globally in more than 70 countries.

    BizTalk360

    BizTalk360 bundles over 50+ features into one single solution to make BizTalk server monitoring and administration super-efficient and secure. BizTalk360 provides everything enterprises need for BizTalk operations, monitoring, analytics, and more. Operations dashboards, widgets, advanced event viewer, data monitoring dashboards, notification channels, and throttling analyser and new relic integration are some of the features of BizTalk360.

    Serverless360

    Serverless360 is a portal focused on Operations and Support for Microsoft Azure Serverless resources, a Complementary tool to Azure portal in supporting Azure Serverless Application. Enterprises can better manager their business applications through Serverless360 and do end to end tracking on the message flowing through the Serverless Resources, and more.

    Document360

    Document360 is a Knowledge Base platform, engineered for growing companies. Businesses can instantly create an online Self-service knowledge base for your customer & employees (accessed either publicly or privately).

    Cerebrata

    Cerebrata Cerulean provides out of box support for a number of commonly used Azure services. It also provides deep integration with Azure Portal and Azure Cloud Shell to manage other Azure services.

    Kovai.co – Business Model and Revenue Model

    The business model of Kovai.co differs for each of their products based on its respective target audience. For instance any company with BizTalk server are their potential targets.

    For Serverless360, that target is vast – Anyone with Azure resources in their integration platform, can use this application.

    For Document360, this is also a vast adoption platform and basically anyone who needs documentation in SaaS or in On premise model is their target audience.

    Kovai.co – Customer Acquisition

    The first activity they undertook once they got a prototype of the product was to reach out to all their connections (experts from technical writing community, CXOs of companies etc) requesting them to try out the product and share their valuable feedback. The feedback received were evaluated, prioritized, and then passed on to the engineering team for development. Their marketing teams had begun writing blogs on showcasing the use cases of the product thereby generating prospective leads from readers. The sales team would then showcase demos of the product to these prospects and encourage them to take a trial of the product so that they can use it firsthand to understand the value it creates. They were frugal in their approach as they did not want to spend too much money and resources until the first 100 customers were acquired.

    Kovai.co – Challenges Faced

    In any business typically challenges are with people, like core people leaving at wrong times, wrong hires, people you trusted leave and they take away a few of your core members etc. These challenges will continue to remain and it’s the passion the founder has for building products and solving business user problems that drives the startup forward. Its also has the ability to impact so many people’s lives and create something big in the community, especially in Coimbatore which is a tier two city & the founders’ hometown. Moreover, challenges are never permanent. Any adversity that comes your way will subside over time. They have lost some crucial members at critical moments, but if they look back, it’s a short-term pain. There will be struggle for a while but eventually things will turnaround.

    Kovai.co – Marketing

    Content marketing has been the most successful marketing campaign. They write some high quality blogs focusing on multiple use cases of their product and enable their audience to clearly understand the value they will get out of the Kovai.co products.

    Kovai.co – Growth

    The last two years (2020 & 2021) has been a moment of many milestones for us.

    • Kovai.co hired over 175 people during this period
    • They made the first acquisition with Cerebrata in 2020
    • They crossed $10M in ARR in 2020
    • Document360 acquired over 500 customers in a year
    • In 2021 they have focussed on growing their products to the next level in terms of new features, enhancements, acquiring new customers, etc. They also put together a separate team & started working on a new product which will be launched in Q2 of 2022.

    Their medium-term plan is to generate a $30M ARR within the next 3 years and their long-term plan is to be a SaaS Unicorn by 2030.

    Kovai.co – Acquisitions

    Kovai.co acquired Cerebrata in the year 2020.

    Kovai.co – Competitors

    Their enterprise products BizTalk360 & Serverless360 do not really have any prominent competitors.

    The competitors for Document360 are:

    • Bloomfire
    • Helpjuice
    • ProProfs Knowledge base
    • Confluence
    • Help Scout
    • Help Docs

    Kovai.co – Tools Used to Run The Startups

    Microsoft OneNote captures all my to-do lists, ideas, notes, etc. It is a flexible tool – to manage my day-to-day tasks efficiently. Microsoft teams for communication and collaboration within teams. It is one of the powerful tools that helped us get going during the pandemic. Their integration with third-party collaboration tools makes them a very robust tool.

    The team uses Adobe Photoshop extensively for designing dashboards and elements. It is their go-to design tool for image creation and graphic design. Microsoft Azure DevOps practices and tools provide support in building and deploying applications. It offers reliable support during each development lifecycle.

    Kovai.co – Recognition and Achievements

    Kovai.co has won the following awards in the last two years

    1. Bootstrapped SaaS Startup of the year 2021 by SaaSBoomi – a community of SaaS Founders in India
    2. Bootstrap Champ 2021 Award by The Economic Times Startup Awards
    3. Document360 recognized under the SaaS Category as part of Nasscom Emerge 50 Awards.

    FAQs

    What type of company is Kovai.co?

    Kovai.co is an Enterprise Software & SaaS products company.

    Who is the founder of Kovai.co?

    Saravana Kumar is the founder of Kovai.co.

    When was Kovai.co founded?

    Kovai.co was founded in 2011.

    What are the products of Kovai.co?

    Kovai.co has four different products. These are:

    • BizTalk360
    • Serverless360
    • Document360
    • Cerebrata

  • Best Knowledge Management Systems And Tools

    For a software or an SaaS, users often have questions regarding their functioning, features or even any technical issues they might face. This is also true for websites. One common solution for such situations is a Customer Support Platform for customers to contact, and resolve their queries. Although viable, this solution is far from perfect; after all, users don’t really prefer calling customer support if things can be sorted on their own.

    This is where Knowledge Management Systems come in. They help organizations build a repository of frequently asked questions, queries and solutions to possible issues. All the valuable information which might be required by the users, is stored and sorted in one place. These are documented in a format which can be efficiently understood by users. This helps users save time by not having to contact customer support. It allows users to self-help so they can resolve the technical issues all by themselves. This also help in maintaining an easy to find and informative knowledge base for both, customers and employees.

    Knowledge Management Systems have helped various users and organizations in handling customer queries and continue to do so, and in recent times, various such applications have emerged, that claim to be the best in business. This can often be overwhelming, and baffle users, as to which one they should prefer. So here we compare 5 most popular Knowledge Management Systems, so you can make the best pick that suits your business.

    Guru Knowledge Management Software
    Servicenow Knowledge Management
    Document360 Knowledge Management Software
    Confluence Knowledge Management System
    ProProfs Knowledge Management System
    FAQs

    Guru Knowledge Management Software

    Guru | Knowledge Management System
    Guru | Knowledge Management System

    Guru is a robust Knowledge Management System, and a ‘guru’ in its own right. It helps keep users up with the workflow providing any information needed, with just a few clicks. Guru offers a verification workflow and a browser extension for quick information access, along with automated onboarding. Its knowledge alerts keeps the employees updated in real-time and delivers information whenever, and wherever you need it. Also, you can integrate Guru with Slack and Microsoft Teams, for better team collaboration and communication.

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    Features Offered by Guru

    • Guru allows you to organize information in a way suited to your business or application employees, and is accessible effortlessly.
    • Guru’s browser extension as well as integration with slack allow you to find the necessary information, anytime and anywhere.
    • Guru creates a repository of all required information ranging from Google Docs to Slack to within application, to make it centrally available.
    • It allows you to sync all your internal and external data, in turn keeping it up to date. Moreover, with Collection, Boards, and Groups you can view, who is looking for what, and get insights into your data repository.
    • Keep your knowledge base up to date and expert verified, avoid having duplicate content, and get insights to further improve your knowledge base.

    Pricing for Guru

    Starter Plan Builder Plan Expert Plan Enterprise Plan
    Built for small teams and comes free of cost Built for fast growing organizations and costs $14 per user per month Built for customer facing teams and costs $24 per user per month Built for huge enterprises and offers custom pricing
    Comes with a browser extension, Slack and Microsoft Teams integration All features included in Starter plan with Knowledge triggers, API access, and analytics All features included in Builder Plan along with AI suggestions and Intelligent Duplicate Detection All features included in the Expert plan with other custom features
    Knowledge fields include cards, Q&A, and knowledge clipper Offers knowledge triggers and alerts Offers AI Suggest Expert and Text Along with AI Suggest, it also offers users custom AI integrations
    Starter plan offers users to embed Guru cards Builder plan offers user insights and analytics Expert plan users also get ticket linking with API access Users enjoy ticket linking, API access, along with Guru cards and analytics
    Standard customer succcess support and uptime Roles and groups security with standard support and uptime Roles and groups security with standard support and uptime SAML compliance with user provisioning and deprovisioning along with premiere customer supportSer

    Guru Knowledge Management System

    Servicenow Knowledge Management

    ServiceNow | Knowledge Management Tool
    ServiceNow | Knowledge Management Tool

    Servicenow is an ML driven knowledge management system focused on enhancing self service of customers and boost employee productivity. With its knowledge sharing platform and knowledge gap identification using quality trends and usage tracking, Servicenow endeavors to increase user satisfaction, and help them harness knowledge from communities. Servicenow knowledge management covers for IT, Employee, and Customer workflows, along with your self developed application.

    Features Offered by Servicenow

    • Integrate with Microsoft Word online, and experience a simplified knowledge and additional authoring to manage the learning curve.
    • Identify and visualize knowledge gaps and assign gaps to authors using ML models to enhance self service of customers.
    • Servicenow also allows employees and agents to capture relevant knowledge based articles during their work.
    • Enhance your feedback process using improved organizational knowledge, along with customer and employee knowledge management feedback.
    • You can also convert casual and unshaped conversations into structured knowledge, and deploy information from articles and communities to your knowledge base.

    Pricing for Servicenow

    There is no free plan for service now. They offer quote-based plan. One needs to contact servicenow for the plan and pricing details.

    Servicenow Knowledge Management

    Document360 Knowledge Management Software

    Document360 Knowledge Base Platform
    Document360 Knowledge Base Platform

    Document360 is a Knowledge Base Platform built for growing companies, and allows you to create creative, out-of-the-box self serving knowledge base, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Document360 also furnishes you with an intuitive interface, wherein the editors and reviewers get a Knowledge Base portal which they can edit with ease, while the customers employees can view all the information that they need through the Knowledge Base Site.

    Features Offered by Document360

    • The Knowledge Base Portal offers editors an editor and allows for a category manager, versioning along with rollback.
    • Analytics tool in Knowledge Base Portal informs editors of the traffic, and what the users are more interested in, through metrics, user feedback, and link analytics.
    • The Knowledge Base Site can be customized and branded with navigation menu and custom domain, while also offering you an AI powered search engine in real-time.
    • For SaaS and Websites, Document360 offers a Knowledge Base Assistant, which can be seamlessly integrated with your product, and offers on demand help to customers.
    • Document360 also offers various extensions and integrations including Helpdesks, Chatbots, Analytics tools, CRO tools, as well as conferencing tools.

    Pricing for Document360

    Startup Plan Business Plan Enterprise Plan Enterprise plus Plan
    Costs $49 per project per month Costs $149 per project per month Costs $299 per project per month Offers custom pricing depending on the plan
    Allows for 2 team accounts and costs $5 per additional account per month Allows for 5 team accounts and costs $7 per additional account per month Allows for 15 team accounts and costs $9 per additional account per month Allows unlimited team accounts
    Offers 5GB storage and costs $1 per additional GB per month Offers 50GB storage and costs $1 per additional GB per month Offers 150GB storage and costs $1 per additional GB per month Offers 300GB storage and costs $1 per additional GB per month
    Offers 10k page visits per month along with $1 per month for additional 1000 visits Offers 50k page visits per month along with $1 per month for additional 1000 visits Offers 150k page visits per month along with $1 per month for additional 1000 visits Offers 300k page visits per month along with $1 per month for additional 1000 visits
    Offers 1 Knowledge Base version Offers 2 Knowledge Base versions Offers 6 Knowledge Base versions Offers 12 Knowledge Base versions

    How to create a knowledge base in Document 360

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    Confluence Knowledge Management System

    Confluence | Knowledge Management System
    Confluence | Knowledge Management System

    Confluence by Atlassian is a collaboration and knowledge base platform, which helps centralize all your organization’s important information in one place. It allows you to harness the collective information of your organization from your employees and store the accumulation in the form of easy to find answers. This way, all team members can be motivated, ranging from HR to marketing, to share their information and announcements, to create a knowledge sharing platform, which keeps itself updated in real time.

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    Features Offered by Confluence

    • Confluence offers an intuitive structure with pages, where information can be added and edited as well as spaces with pages for individual teams, groups, and personnel.
    • The knowledge base for documentation and product requirements consists of advanced search and page trees to find pages and page hierarchy.
    • Confluence offers you to choose from a collection of customizable templates, and helps you deploy plans with powerful Jira integrations.
    • Real-time editing allows for your knowledge base to always be updated, while the page and inline comments make things simpler form editors.
    • Manage permissions and share information between groups and teams, and spread new information with blogs asserting transparency.

    Pricing for Confluence

    Free Plan Standard Plan Premium Plan Enterprise Plan
    Free for up to 10 users Costs $5 per user and an average $50 a month Costs $10 per user and an average $100 a month Custom pricing according to the plan opted
    Offers unlimited pages and spaces with page versioning, along with structured page tree Offers page and space permissions with insights and audit logs Premium plan offers you analytics with team calendars and permission inspection Enterprise plan offers users admin insights and external collaboration
    Free plan includes password policies and domain verification Standard plan includes password policies and domain verification along with session duration management Offers disaster recovery and IP allowlisting Enterprise plan offers you sandbox along with data residency
    Allows for 2GB of file storage with community support llows for 250GB of file storage with support at local business hours Unlimited file storage with 24/7 premium support Unlimited file storage with 24/7 enterprise support

    Confluence Knowledge Base

    ProProfs Knowledge Management System

    ProProfs Knowledge Base software
    ProProfs Knowledge Base software

    ProProfs is a Knowledge Base Software that helps users to create knowledge bases, user manuals, and documentations. With 24/7 instant self help and access management, ProProfs helps develop team collaboration with over 100 integrations and settings. You can create knowledge bases and help sites within minutes with an easy setup, and help customers find answers to more frequent questions. Also, you get absolute control over your viewership, and choose to make your site public or restrict access.

    Features Offered by ProProfs

    • ProProfs enables team collaboration by creating different groups and assigning different admins, editors and other positions of responsibility to individuals.
    • ProProfs has an easy setup, and needs no software downloads, and can be accessible anytime at any place and any device.
    • It helps reduce customer emails and calls by furnishing them with self-help facilities, while allowing users to customize and brand the knowledge base according to their theme.
    • Secure controls of the knowledge base, retain employee knowledge and store it in an efficient manner, and centralize documents with analytics and reports.
    • ProProfs also offers various integrations including Zendesk, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Disqus among various others, for smooth functioning.

    Pricing for ProProfs Knowledge Base

    Free Plan Essentials Plan Premium Plan
    Free plan offers users 20 Knowledge Base Articles Costs $0.3 per page per month Costs $0.5 per page per month
    Allows for unlimited page views, with 1 knowledge base and manual Allows for unlimited page views, with 1 knowledge base and manual Allows for unlimited knowledgebases, manuals and, docs
    Offers professional templates along with 1 author/editor Offers branding, custom domain, version control, 1 author/editor, and 1 private site Allows unlimited authors, private sites, along with roles and collaboration
    This plan offers users 10 learners in Training makers, 1 operator and 1 agent for help desk Offers basic help widget and integrations with premium customer support Offers advanced help widget, integrations and onboarding and success manager

    ProProfs Knowledge Management Software

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    FAQs

    What is meant by knowledge management?

    Knowledge management is the process of management and maintenance of an organization’s information and knowledge and makes the best use of knowledge. It is stored as a knowledge base so that it can be referred to in the future.

    What is Knowledge management system?

    A knowledge management system is an IT system or tool that stores and retrieves knowledge to improve understanding, collaboration, and process alignment. It helps in organizing all the organizational information and knowledge in the form of guided workflows, FAQs, articles, and more and makes it easily accessible for both internal and external customers.