KnowledgeLink purchases infoMarket and Lotus Newsstand

In a move to deepen its roots as a knowledge broker, KnowledgeLink Interactive has acquired the assets and software licenses of IBM's online content services infoMarket and Lotus Newsstand. Newsstand offers subscription-based access to high-value business and trade publications, newspapers, magazines, periodicals and analysts reports, which are often unavailable in electronic form anywhere else. For a per-document fee, infoMarket allows researchers to find, prioritize and assess information from thousands of newswires, newspapers, newsletters, and journals, as well as a repository of information on more than 11 million companies. The services will continue to operate as separate entitites, and will be combined with Persavant, KnowledgeLink's forthcoming personalized information delivery service scheduled for release in June. The new services give KnowledgeLink "the ability to combine extensive content sources with state-of-the-art knowledge broker software that enables true knowledge management," said KnowledgeLink founder and CEO Edwin Addison.

"The KnowledgeLink acquisitions represent an important step forward in the evolution of the knowledge management market," said Gerry Murray, research manager of the International Data Corporation (IDC). "Companies that want to become knowledge organizations will find a good starting point in the rich content and tools for managing delivery that KnowledgeLink can now provide." The Delphi Group agrees, saying that knowledge brokers offer new opportunities for tailoring offerings that address knowledge management market needs. "The acquisition of the IBM content businesses by KnowledgeLink puts the startup company in a position to test the commercial viability of a new kind of publishing intermediary: the knowledge aggregator." According to Delphi, the challenge for KnowledgeLink, Infomation and others following this strategy is "to establish the value proposition for the single access point delivery of information from disparate sources ­ all of which is already available a la carte for users willing to roll their own."

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