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 Tour de Force by Sharla A. Paul  e or Be Eaten by David Black Aiming Beyond by Jane Howell |
Ask Karnak -- the next generation of knowledge search engines  Aly Salam '85EMBA President and CEO VedaSource and Karnak.com While working for Equifax as director of strategic planning, Aly Salam '85EMBA felt the tug to complement his technical background--degrees in electrical engineering and computer science--with financial and business skills. He had no way of knowing then where that decision would lead him today. "The EMBA seems at times to be an impossible program. You have to turn off everything else in your life," recalls Salam, president and CEO of VedaSource, an information services company that provides knowledge solutions for the Internet. Yet he says he would absolutely do it again--particularly given the extent to which marketing, technology, and customer support have evolved in the fifteen years since he earned his degree and in the seven years since leaving Equifax to satisfy an entrepreneurial bent. "The EMBA program made me feel comfortable enough to leave a corporate environment and go out on my own," says this two-time start-up veteran. His first venture, launched in 1993, was a telemedicine company that automated patient medical information in the managed-care process and allowed care providers and insurance companies to share repetitive information on multiple forms. He sold the business in 1997 to launch VedaSource. Since 1999 VedaSource's primary product has been Karnak (http://www.karnak.com). With a name inspired by an ancient Egyptian city, Karnak is a knowledge engine that helps users find, store, distribute, and share information. VedaSource also customizes Karnak to develop intelligent processes for clients using proprietary data. Unlike a search engine, Karnak recognizes individual users, so it knows what they want and will continue to search while they're offline, store the results, then e-mail notification that it has found more--or more recent--information. "As a professional," says Salam, "you're able to keep current on whatever subject matter or field of interest you have. You can stay up to date on your competitors, your product, your industry, the use or misuse of your copyright, what is happening with key individuals--what's being written about them or whether they're publishing. It's an intelligent assistant that does everything that a human assistant would or should do to distill knowledge to the end user." NBC News has touted the benefits of Karnak, and Salam has collected pages of accolades and unsolicited testimonials from users. "They seem most often to tell me, 'I don't know what I did before I found you guys.'" Georgia A. Dzurica 
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