Knowledge will change the game, says Walker

“At some time in every industry an innovation comes along that excites business leaders and challenges the status quo ­- an innovation that delivers a step change in business performance and can truly be described as ‘disruptive innovation’.

“I believe Knowledge is that innovation.”

This is how PCS managing director Phillip Walker introduced PCS’s new digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, to delegates at the prestigious InterSystems’ Symposium at London’s Marriott Twickenham hotel.

Walker was invited to address the annual event, run by the makers of the innovative object oriented Caché database on which Knowledge is built, for its European customers and partners in the wake of PCS’s success in winning the company’s Worldwide Innovator Award earlier this year.

Nearly 250 delegates were introduced to Knowledge, then were given the first major public view of the system as Walker led them through a demonstration of its multiple simultaneous output capability, in which content was created live during the symposium by browser, using the hotel's broadband connection, for a white paper of the day’s events, which was also output in real time to two web sites, an e-reader and an iPhone application.

Although commissioned by one of the UK’s leading regional publishing companies to power a daily news operation that produces two of the country’s biggest-selling evening papers and a host of weekly titles, Walker told the audience that Knowledge is nevertheless designed to operate in wider, non-publishing, markets.

He said: "Knowledge is a flexible system that will stand alone or will integrate very tightly with other Caché or Ensemble-based systems to provide digital content management to traditional publishers or non-publisher organisations who need to marshall and distribute information internally and externally.”

Walker added that the use of Caché and Ensemble would allow Knowledge to replace many different systems with one single system, bringing savings in time and efficiency that were already being realised despite the fact that Knowledge was still a system in development.

And, reminding delegates of PCS’s long history in innovation in the UK publishing industry, Walker invoked the memory of the company’s ground-breaking Press 11 system as he closed the presentation.

“When PCS was born in 1973 there was no internet, there were no mobile phones, no PC’s, no Microsoft, no Apple. At that time, PCS was instrumental in changing the game in the publishing industry with its mainframe-based publishing system.

“That was the first chapter.

“The second chapter is Knowledge – and we think we're going to change the game all over again.”

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