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Enterprise customers, the people at QuePlix saw the current situation coming, and they've already got a solution. We're not talking about the economy, but the consolidation in the enterprise application market that has left many companies struggling to free information from unsupported legacy apps.

We recently spoke with Paul Tenberg, the director of Business Development for QuePlix (pronounced Q-plix), who explained that the six-year-old company's founders came with a lot of enterprise application experience and used that knowledge to build the company. They saw that the enterprise space was changing, as smaller venders were acquired by larger ones, and knew that would leave many companies with critical business functions locked into legacy applications. The solution was not just to free that data, but to bring it forward in a meaningful way.

QuePlix has just released the second of its platform-agnostic programs which are each designed to retrieve information from legacy applications. The first solution was QueWeb, which not only extracts legacy application metadata, but then builds a user interface on top of it. The allows the company to make a transition toward new applications while still using the data from legacy apps. Because it's based on existing systems, there's no need to train staff on how to use it and that allows for a smoother migration. The program's simplicity and usefulfull translates into a huge ROI, Tenberg says. QueWeb was launched in 2001 and is already up to its third version.

A Corporate Google?

The latest application in the company's product portfolio is QueSearch. Think of this as a highly refined Google. QueSearch creates a search engine for your legacy data. The key difference, though, is that it doesn't simply present an unstructured list of results; it structures the data in meaningful ways.

As long as your company has a relational database, QueSearch can pull structured data from it. It can pull from CRM apps, tracking systems, knowledge bases, product catalogs, billing systems, and marketing campaigns. The results are like having a corporate Google.

The secret behind both applications is the company's QueCrawler technology. To create effective results, the software needs to search a variety of structured data (such as information from enterprise applications) and unstructured data (such as from individual files). Then, the application keeps existing relationships between the data. In the case of QueSearch, QueCrawler puts data in a format that a search engine can recognize and rank.

The security in place with both applications recognizes the permissions levels companies have already put into place, and creates levels of access without being told. You don't need to worry, says Tenberg, that a low-level clerk will uncover a spreadsheet on executive bonuses. And if someone does access a file they weren't supposed to, the program alerts the administrator.

While enterprise integration is a hot topic currently, and companies are spending millions getting their various systems to talk to each other, the QuePlix solutions bypass that entirely. They achieve integration by pulling data from all connected systems and returning it in a useful, structured way.

QueSearch is currently beta testing with two customers and will launch sometime this summer. Pricing starts at about $20,000, although the final price depends on the model chosen (such as cloud model or document-based model).

The QueSearch user interface.

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