The Dozen 2003Inxight Software Inc.Sunnyvale, Calif."Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink." If Samuel Taylor Coleridge were alive to receive a nickel for every time this famous line has been lifted from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), he would surely buy a round of Crystal Geyser for the house. He might also take up his feather to write another epic, this time about data — particularly the unstructured variety. Data is everywhere; and in our modern world where nothing disappears, there's more produced every day. Governments, businesses, universities, and even budding poets would like to "drink" from this ubiquitous resource. But as with the ocean, the transformation necessary for its consumption is not trivial. Inxight Software is an emerging leader in the field of unstructured data management. The company focuses on the "data out" problems of locating, revealing, and analyzing information existing in a sea of data that, for organizations to leverage successfully, requires intelligent automation. Customer interactions and collaborative business processes are dominated by unstructured data. Legal and regulatory compliance, security, personal communication, and other activities also live primarily in a data ecosystem that slips too easily through the fingers of traditional data management. And, needless to say, with surveillance data streaming in and piling up, the U.S. Department of Defense and government intelligence agencies have an urgent need to fill in the war against terrorism. In other words, it is with far more than casual interest that many organizations — including BI and enterprise software vendors itching to expand out from the traditional data world — are checking out what Inxight and a collection of other players, including Autonomy, Inktomi, Stratify, Webversa, and Verity have to offer. Simultaneously growing and consolidating, the market features a blinding array of tools for categorization, classification, linguistic analysis, search, taxonomy, text mining, and other algorithmic activities. Buyers must choose carefully. PARC PedigreeIt would be hard for buyers not to take Inxight seriously. Founded in 1997, the company owes its birth to the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (now called "PARC"), where Inxight founder and CTO Ramana Rao performed pioneering research. Holding a large number of patents in visualization, natural language processing, and information retrieval, Inxight already has its technology inside the offerings of several major vendors. Inxight SmartDiscovery is looking like the suite to beat. Sailing into the unstructured waters, Inxight might look to Coleridge for inspiration: "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free; we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea." MAJOR MOVES IN 2002· Released Categorizer 3.0, improving taxonomy model management · Raised $22 million in its fourth round of funding, led by VantagePoint Venture Partners · Acquired technology assets of WhizBang! Labs, incorporating extraction technology into SmartDiscovery INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISES· Computer Associates, which licenses Star Tree visualization software in Unicenter · USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service uses VizServer and Table Lens technology to analyze very large databases
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