Overview

RepKnight is an exemplar of a Product business model. The company’s software captures, analyses and reports on data from open source digital, social media, and dark web sources. Governments, defence, law enforcement agencies and companies use this information to discover and improve their response to risks and threats, identify criminality, and manage major events. RepKnight offers subscriptions to its software at different price points with monthly data allowances.

History

RepKnight, founded by John Reid, is jointly headquartered in London and Belfast, Northern Ireland. RepKnight was developed in 2011 through the UK Government Small Business Research and Innovation programme, in response to a government requirement following events including the London riots and a series of global security incidents. In December 2013 the company was chosen to be a part of London’s Tech City Future Fifty. In 2014 RepKnight won the prestigious Security Innovation Award from the Home Office and security and defence trade organisation ADS Group at the Security & Policing Exhibition in Farnborough, UK. In January 2015, RepKnight was part of the delegation led by UK Prime Minister David Cameron on a UK Trade and Investment mission to Washington, DC on cyber security, and again to Asia in July 2015.

Customers

RepKnight’s customers come from the public and private sectors. This includes government agencies, defence organisations, police and security forces, and corporates. RepKnight has worked with UK national intelligence to ensure the software capability tracks the requirement of agencies and organisations dealing with threat, risk and harm.

Learn more about the Product Business Model

A dyadic transactional relationship where your good or service can be designed and delivered without prior interactions with the customer.

Engagement  — Value Creation Proposition

Manually tracking and sorting through web and social media content, even through aggregator websites, is a near-impossible task for a single person or team. RepKnight’s software uses algorithms to find and analyse relevant digital data from across the internet. The results are displayed in a user-friendly dashboard. Simple tools enable the user to search, visualise, understand and easily report on the findings, creating information that is used to help decision-making. RepKnight’s software is highly secure and has been built for customers in government, intelligence, defence and security who require the highest security levels.

Delivery — Value Chain

RepKnight delivers value through a Software-as-a-Service platform (not to be confused with Platform-as-a-Service). It develops its software and algorithms in-house to scan, analyse, and make sense of data from sources across the internet, with open-source data such as social media sites being available in real-time. Customers can choose which sources they want to monitor. The software can focus on spikes in keyword usage, geographic information, sentiment analysis, influencers and trends, and provides its alerts when a topic a customer is interested in starts to trend or spike. RepKnight can also be used for engagement, and content can be posted in real-time or scheduled.

Monetisation — Value Capture

RepKnight offers several structured plans that allow customers to buy volumes of data, used by as many users as they need. RepKnight also offers training in open-source intelligence methods and techniques, to help customers make the most of both the software to find the information and their use of open-source intelligence.

 

 

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RepKnight (2013). Future Fifty Announcement [Online], accessed May 12, 2015 from https://www.repknight.com/future-fifty-announcemen…

RepKnight (2016). RepKnight. [Online], accessed April 14, 2016 from https://www.repknight.com/ and https://www.repknight.com/about-us/

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Disclaimer — Written by Douglas Markey and edited by James Knuckles under the direction of Prof Charles Baden-Fuller, Cass Business School. This case is designed to illustrate a business model category. It leverages public sources and is written to further management understanding, and it is not meant to suggest individuals made either correct or incorrect decisions. © 2016 Published 21 April 2016