The reason high tech marketers love jargon like “Enterprise Web 2.0″ so much is not simply because it creates bandwagons to hitch a ride on–although there are plenty of companies trying to climb aboard the 2.0 express because it’s the latest hot thing. 

In many cases, the jargon serves a useful purpose.  Simply having a commonly understood label that implies certain specific inherent characteristics helps companies explain to themselves, and to potential customers, exactly what they do.  KnowNow is one of those companies that stands to benefit most by finally finding the right category.

Founded in 2000 by a couple of geeks named Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare around the rather esoteric idea of “event routing technology” (basically software they tells users in real-time when something they’re interested in happens), KnowNow attracted lots of venture capital with an early marketing emphasis on the “real-time enterprise” buzz, which turned out to be less of a starter than the money men like Ray Lane hoped it would be.  Six years down the road, the company is still struggling to capture the attention of the corporate IT market.  As recently as a year ago, the company’s tag line was:   ”Simple Integration Connecting Data, Applications, and People: Business-to-Business, Event-Driven, Loosely-Coupled.”  Pity the poor CIO who tried to explain to management why the company really, really had to have that baby. 

Consider this little gem of geek-speak that PR folks tagged onto each press release up until last year: 

KnowNow’s event-driven integration software connects systems, applications and databases to people quickly and easily, providing immediate visibility into business-critical information. Leveraging the value of existing IT investments without disruption, KnowNow eliminates traditional boundaries of integration by using publish-subscribe over native HTTP to deliver information to the people who need it. 

Compare that exciting sales pitch to the way KnowNow explains itself in its current press releases.

KnowNow, a leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, provides a publish and subscribe platform that allows users to specify the information they want delivered, when and where they want it, as it is published. KnowNow is the best way for people to manage the massive amount of information available to them, by giving them control of the information provided from multiple sources. 

It’s amazing what a little jargon can do for a company’s focus and pitch.  KnowNow had been an Enterprise 2.0 company all along; it just didn’t know it.  With the growing importance of RSS (or ESS, as the company dubs it), KnowNow finds itself extremely well positioned in the 2.0 movement, with valuable experience in middleware and an already-developed set of tools that simplify the integration of RSS servers with other data sources, especially legacy applications in companies. 

KnowNow has gone through a flurry of activity over the past three months, appointing a new CEO and a team of experienced Big Software executives and introducing three new Enterprise 2.0 products designed to “increase business collaboration and gain competitive advantage by immediately connecting critical information with the appropriate people.”

The VCs have clearly sent in the cavalry with lots of fresh ammunition.  The success or failure of KnowNow over the next year or so will be a good test of whether the whole Web 2.0 notion is just another flash-in-the-pan marketing ploy or whether it really can capture a viable share of the enterprise IT market.