By Allan Maurer
RESTON, VA—Future Point Systems says the digital world is forcing many companies to deal with a problem the government and armed services have always had, analysis of mass quantities of information. “The government and its intelligence services have always had to deal with that,” says recently appointed CEO Mike Metscher. “But now commercial companies doing market research have so much more data to analyze they need good tools.” Future Point Systems sells a tool originally developed for the U.S. Army that helps its clients visualize and manage all that data.
Future Point Systems was founded in 2006 in partnership with Pacific Northwest National Lab. As a private commercial enterprise, Future Point Systems has been granted exclusive rights to develop and market Starlight VIS (Visual Information System), capitalizing on millions of dollars of government-funded R&D.
Starlight helps users visually manage, understand, and derive new knowledge from massive quantities of heterogeneous and complexly related information, the company says.
Metscher tells TechJournal South the company still sells primarily to the government customers such as the FBI, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command and numbers others with an unending need to process those huge quantities of data. But commercial organizations have an increasing need for tools like Starlight, he says.
“Due to the digital world, they’re able to get much more data on consumers through Web sites, such as a massive amount of product review data from actual consumers and a lot more data on the Internet to bge harvested. They can get faster feedback from customers, but it’s a lot of data to ingest and decide what to do with.”
Starlight, he says, allows the company’s clients to analyze more data with fewer people. The product offers numerous ways users can visualize their data and offers them choices on how to bring data into the system.
Among areas where the company sees it as useful in the commercial sector include:
Legal Analytics—Starlight can process enormous amounts of dissimilar data to quickly locate key items or piece together causal chains, as well as execute eDiscovery, computer forensics, email analytics, compliance, or IP management.
Market and Competitive Intelligence—With the ability to integrate blogs, chat forums, social networks and traditional Web sites, Starlight can unlock significant value from many forms of consumer expression.
Cyber-Security and Computer Forensics—Analysts can use Starlight for a vast range of security tasks, from examining a computer system after a break-in or seizure, to sifting through NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection System) data to uncover suspicious connections between machines.
“It looks like a Windows program,” he explains. “You pull up the different views, some 3D and see relationships quickly.” Among other things, it also will map the data from geospacial coordinates so that it can then be ouput on Google Earth. “We have a lot of Google Earth users,” says Metscher.
The data can also be imported to the Microsoft clipboard, Excel, Powerpoint and other documents. And documents such as a directory of emails, Powerpoint , PDF, or Word documents can be dragged into a folder and the Starlight tool will process it automatically. “It’s easy to get data into the system,” Metscher says.
The product costs about $30,000 a seat for commercial users and is discounted to the government.
The 11 employee company is not currently seeking outside funding but may next year, the CEO says.
Online: www.futurepointsystems.com
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