Synthesys Cloud-based Automated Understanding Empowers Market Solutions

Arlington, VA and Nashville, TN – January 4, 2012 – Digital Reasoning^™, the leader in unstructured data analytics at scale, today announced that TeraDact Solutions has integrated their TeraDactor^™ Information Identification and Presentation (IIaP™) capabilities including the TeraDactor automated redaction engine, with Synthesys® Cloud, a software-as-a-service data analytics solution.  Digital Reasoning launched Synthesys Cloud as a public platform for partners to access the leading entity-oriented analytics solution with the simplicity of a Web service.

In conjunction with Synthesys, TeraDactor can automatically assist in appropriately classifying information not recognized by the original data provider.   TeraDactor allows participants to push and pull information without waiting for the declassification process, assuring that formerly classified documents may be released without unintended leakages.

“As governments and enterprises comb their data for security threats and competitive issues, secure document sharing is a must, but in order for that disclosure to occur, sensitive data must be controlled,” said Chris Schrichte, President and CEO of TeraDact Solutions.  “By leveraging Synthesys Cloud, we are able to automatically categorize the data, allowing for the most effective and secure sharing of mission critical information in the most timely manner.”

“We are pleased to be partnering with TeraDact as they bring this innovative product to market that ensures sensitive information can be shared safely,” said Tim Estes, Chief Executive Officer, at Digital Reasoning. “This partnership demonstrates the power of Synthesys as a cloud-based data analytics tool in building the next generation of Big Data analytic solutions.”

About Synthesys Cloud

The Synthesys Cloud is an open and scalable web service for data analytics enabling users and developers to easily create innovative solutions that depend on entity-oriented analytics as a component of a complete solution. Built to address the most complicated data analytics challenges, Synthesys excels at extracting, resolving and linking entities and concepts to provide context to the newly discovered information. Synthesys Cloud was launched in early 2011 and has over 30 companies and varying stages of development and testing to bring innovative solutions to market.

About TeraDactor

TeraDactor is an embeddable Web-based proprietary solution that gives organizations effective control of complex document formats and the data contained within them. TeraDactor exposes all visible and hidden content to reviewers, automatic rule sets, and third party software to enable a collaborative review process in which reviewers and potential recipients of reports receive only the appropriate document contents and paragraphs.  The TeraDactor integration toolset allows information managers to leverage TeraDactor for a wide range of missions from real-time compliance checking to fine-grained information control and release of sensitive information to appropriate persons. TeraDactor’s Universal Viewer embeds into any application and leaves all classifiers and their release conditions under application control while extending this control to every review mark.

About TeraDact Solutions, Inc.

TeraDact Solutions’ (www.teradact.com) toolset challenges current sensitive document and information management and sharing policies. Its technology allows information managers to check, version, and release the right information to the right audience at the right time.  TeraDact is headquartered in Missoula, Montana, with offices in Washington, D.C., and Edmonton, Alberta.  For more information, please visit www.teradact.com.

About Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning (www.digitalreasoning.com) provides automated understanding for Big Data.  Automated understanding analyzes unstructured and structured data to reveal the hidden and potentially valuable relationships between people, place and time.  More than a dozen government agencies use Digital Reasoning’s flagship product, Synthesys, to uncover security threats and accelerate the time to actionable intelligence.  The company is headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, with a satellite office in Washington, DC which serves its growing government client base.  For more information, please visit www.digitalreasoning.com.

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Top Tier Investor to Join Board

Nashville, TN – December 6, 2011 – Digital Reasoning, a leader in understanding unstructured data at scale, today announced it has raised a Series B round with participation from In-Q-Tel, individual partners of Silver Lake, and other private investors. With this round, Digital Reasoning will add John Brennan to its board of directors.  Brennan is a partner at Silver Lake Sumeru.

The investment will be used to accelerate development and expand marketing and sales into new Financial Intelligence, Enterprise Risk Management, and related markets with Synthesys®, the company’s flagship product that identifies, summarizes and reveals hidden relationships between people, places and events in big data. Currently, Synthesys is being used in government agencies to uncover security threats and enable intelligence analysts to find and act on critical relationships in big data while containing the costs of and dependence on human reading.

“Organizations in every market are looking for ways to exploit the information and intelligence embedded in unstructured data; Synthesys could be a transformational solution in the enterprise as organizations develop their big data strategies,” said John Brennan. “Digital Reasoning’s platform can go beyond its success in the government intelligence market to help enterprises quickly analyze big data to detect fraud, uncover market trends, gain better insight into customer behavior, and mitigate risk.”

“We are thrilled to have an investment from this caliber of investor and we welcome John to our board. His software and operating experience will help us scale and expand into new markets”, said Tim Estes, CEO at Digital Reasoning. “Until now, the tools available on Big Data have been focused on mostly structured data that is well formed and easily countable.  Now, we can bring rich understanding of human communication- unstructured data- into new markets through a next generation of analytics that scales and runs on technologies like Hadoop.“

Synthesys has solved three key impediments to the growth of the Big Data Analytics market:

• Eliminating the need for a data model to aid understanding of text
• Handling diverse data at scale without compromising the depth of understanding
• Inventing a way to automatically understand the meaning of words in context

Digital Reasoning has successfully deployed Synthesys as both enterprise software and cloud-based web service. With success on a number of large systems in the Government market, Digital Reasoning will be expanding Synthesys into enterprise commercial markets.

About Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning provides Automated Understanding for Big Data. Automated Understanding analyzes unstructured and structured big data to reveal the hidden and potentially valuable relationships between people, place and time. More than a dozen government agencies use Digital Reasoning’s flagship product, Synthesys, to uncover security threats and accelerate the time to actionable intelligence. The company is headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, with an office in Arlington, Virginia. For more information, please visit www.digitalreasoning.com.

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Digital Reasoning™ and Synthesys® are trademarks of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc.

Arlington, VA and Nashville, TN – May 10, 2011 –Digital Reasoning™, the leader in complex, large scale unstructured data analytics, today announced it has established a Federal Advisory Board to guide the company’s growing presence in the federal market. Led by industry veteran Mike Miller, the Advisory Board includes General Tom Hobbins (U.S. Air Force, Ret.), Robert Flores, Dr. Anita K. Jones and CAPT Nick Buck (U.S. Navy, Ret.).

“The Federal Advisory Board will work closely with our senior management team to establish new partnerships and accelerate our work with the federal market,” said Tim Estes, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Reasoning. “With the federal government’s increased focus on cloud computing, our flagship product Synthesys® provides a unique Entity Oriented Analytics solution that enables government agencies to tap into the power of big data.”
The Advisory Board represents a team with unique insight into the requirements of Big Data, text analytics and intelligence solutions for government agencies.

“I’m happy, proud and humbled to continue to work with Digital Reasoning and the members of the Advisory Board,” said Mike Miller, Chairman of the newly created Board. “The accomplishments of my fellow members on behalf of our Country, its warfighters and citizens have been exemplary. We are grateful for their willingness to work with Digital Reasoning and help solve some of the country’s most complex data challenges.”

Background on Board Members

General William T. Hobbins retired as Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Commander, NATO Allied Air Component Command, Ramstein; and Director, Joint Air Power Competence Centre, Ramstein Air Base, Germany. He has commanded a MAJCOM, a NATO Component, a numbered air force, two tactical fighter wings and a composite air group. He has served as the Director of Plans and Operations for U.S. Forces Japan, Director of Plans and Policy for U.S. Atlantic Command, the Director of Operations for U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and the Deputy Chief of Staff Warfighting Integration and Air Force CIO. In addition, Gen Hobbins was the Lead developer for the first C4ISR flight plan in 2005, and subsequently for the NATO Unmanned Aerial Systems Roadmap in 2007.

Bob Flores is the Founder and President of Applicology Incorporated, an independent consulting firm specializing in informatics and cyber security issues. Prior to starting Applicology, Flores spent 31 years in the U.S. Intelligence Community where he held several positions, including Chief Technology Officer. He was also on several government-wide information sharing committees and councils. In addition to his senior level leadership and management positions, his career included assignments in applications programming, training and education, contract and project management, and both line and staff management roles at various levels of the Agency.

Dr. Anita K. Jones is a distinguished leader in computer science, widely recognized for her scholarship in the field and her prior service to the U.S. Government in managing the U.S. Department of Defense’s science and technology program and overseeing its numerous research activities. Dr. Jones is currently a University Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia. She served as the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense in 1993-1998, and later as vice-chair of the National Science Board. She is a senior fellow of the Defense Science Board and a member of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Corporation and the MIT Corporation. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineering. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

CAPT Nick Buck completed a 26 year Navy career with over 15 years in National Security Space, including 10 years in the National Reconnaissance Office. A Naval Aviator and Test Pilot with over 2500 flight hours, Nick has served as both a supplier and a customer of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Information Technology systems. Nick managed multiple major defense acquisition programs and is a recognized expert in implementing Information Technology consolidation and Cloud Computing programs. A Harvard Senior Executive Fellow, Nick currently serves as President and Chief Executive Officer at Buck Consulting Group, LLC.

Mike Miller has over twenty years of primarily Government sales experience, currently serving as president of M4 Associates. Previously, Miller was the VP of Juniper Networks’ Public Sector Division where he was responsible for all business with Juniper’s Public Sector customers in the U.S. including federal agencies, state and local governments and education. Before that Miller ran worldwide sales for Appian, a leader in the BPM market, where he helped secure strategic wins within the DoD and DHS while substantially increasing its commercial clients and partners. Before joining Appian, Miller held executive positions at Managed Objects, and Computer Associates (CA).

About Digital Reasoning
Digital Reasoning (www.digitalreasoning.com) solves the problem of information overload by providing the tools people need to understand relationships between entities in vast amounts of unstructured and structured data.

Digital Reasoning builds data analytic solutions based on a distinctive mathematical approach to understanding human language. The value of Digital Reasoning is not only the ability to leverage an organization’s existing knowledge base, but also to reveal critical hidden information and relationships that may not have been apparent during manual or other automated analytic efforts. Synthesys is a registered trademark of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc.

Arlington, VA and Nashville, TN – April 26, 2011 –Digital Reasoning^™, the leader in complex, large scale unstructured data analytics, today announced that is has opened a new office in Arlington, VA and added two highly experienced executives to its leadership team to accelerate growth in the government market. Eric von Eckartsberg joins Digital Reasoning as Vice President of Sales and Dave Danielson joins as Vice President of Marketing. The new office is located at 1001 N. Fillmore St in Arlington, VA and is aligned with Digital Reasoning’s strategy to expand its presence in the U.S. government market.

von Eckartsberg brings over 10 years service with the U.S. Government and over 15 years experience managing sales and operations for a number of high technology and consulting companies.  His U.S. Government service in a number of national security related roles included over four years overseas service with the U.S. Embassy in Japan.  von Eckartsberg joins Digital Reasoning from Perceptive Pixel where he was responsible for growing the company’s presence in U.S. and global government markets.  Prior to this, he was responsible for sales into the National Security community for enterprise search vendor Endeca Technologies, and for structured data analytics provider Visual Sciences.   Previously, von Eckartsberg managed teams working on national security information management projects for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

As Vice President of Marketing, Danielson will be responsible for all aspects of the company’s marketing strategy and public relations.  Danielson has enjoyed a long career as a technical marketer, strategist and executive with a number of technology companies.  Most recently he served as the Vice President of Strategy and Managing Director for LexisNexis.  Prior to that, he held the positions of Chief Executive Officer and Vice President Marketing for a number of early-stage technology companies.

“Digital Reasoning is pleased to open its latest office in Washington, DC area. The strategic location of the office, as well as the addition of two key personnel allows us to better serve our growing government client base,” said Tim Estes, Digital Reasoning’s Chief Executive Officer. “Eric and Dave bring significant strengths to Digital Reasoning.  Eric’s extensive government expertise will be vital as we accelerate our work in the U.S. intelligence community and beyond.  Dave’s diverse and agile technology, product, and marketing experience will be instrumental as we increase market awareness of our flagship product Synthesys and enable government agencies to tap into the power of Big Data.”

About Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning (www.digitalreasoning.com) solves the problem of information overload by providing the tools people need to understand relationships between entities in vast amounts of unstructured and structured data.

Digital Reasoning builds data analytic solutions based on a distinctive mathematical approach to understanding human language. The value of Digital Reasoning is not only the ability to leverage an organization’s existing knowledge base, but also to reveal critical hidden information and relationships that may not have been apparent during manual or other automated analytic efforts. Synthesys is a registered trademark of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc.

Tim Estes, CEO to speak “Generating Dynamic Social Networks from Unstructured Data”

Matthew Russell, VP Engineering to speak “Unleashing Twitter Data for Fun and Insight”

Visit us at Booth #305

While most of the attention has been on infrastructure like virtualization / hypervisors, Hadoop, and NoSQL data storage systems, we think those are really the enablers of the killer app for Cloud- which is making sense of data to solve information overload. Without next generation analytics and supporting technology, it is essentially impossible to:

Analyze a flow of data from multiple sensors deployed in a factory

Process mobile traffic at a telephone company

Make sense of unstructured and structured information flowing through an email system

Identify key entities and their importance in a stream of financial news and transaction data.

These are the real world problems that have engaged me for many years. I founded Digital Reasoning to automatically make sense of data because I believed that someday all software would learn and that would unleash the next great revolution in the Information Age. The demand for this revolution is inevitable because while data has increased exponentially, human attention has been essentially static in comparison. Technology to create better return on attention would go from “nice to have” to utterly essential. And now, that moment is here.

Digging a little deeper, Digital Reasoning has created a way to take human communication and use algorithms to make sense of it without having to depend on a human design, an ontology, or some other structure. Our system looks at patterns and the way a word is used in its context and bootstraps the understanding much like a human child does – creating associations and building into more complex relationships.

In 2009, we migrated onto Hadoop and began taking on the problem of managing very large scale unstructured data and move the industry beyond counting things that are well structured and toward being able to figure out exactly what the data means that you are measuring.

Digital Reasoning asks the question: “How do you take loose, noisy information that is disconnected and unstructured and then make sense of it so that you can then apply analytics to it in a way that is valuable to business?”

We identify actors, actions, patterns, and facts and then put it into the context of space and time in an efficient and scalable way. In the government scenario, that can mean to finding and stopping bad guys. In the legal environment they want to answer the questions of “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when”.

Digital Reasoning initially set our focus on the complex task of making sense out of massive volumes of unstructured text within the US Government Intelligence Community after the events of 9/11. But we also believe that our Synthesys software can be utilized in the commercial sector to create great value from the mountains of unstructured data that sit in the Enterprise and streaming in from the Web.

Companies with large-scale data will see value in investing in our technology because they cannot hire 100,000 people to go through and read all of the available material. This matters if you are a bank and trying to make financial trades. This matters for companies doing electronic discovery. This matters for health sectors that need help organizing medical records and guarding against fraud.

We are an emerging firm, growing rapidly and looking to have the best and the brightest join our quest to empower users and customers to make sense of their data through revolutionary software. With the recent investment from In-Q-Tel and partners of Silver Lake, I believe that Digital Reasoning has a great future ahead. We are on the bleeding edge of what is going on with Hadoop and Big Data in the engineering area and how to make sense of data through some of the most advanced learning algorithms in the world. Most of all we care that people are empowered with technology so that they can recover value and time in the race to overcome information overload.

On the passing of Steve Jobs, I find myself surprisingly moved for someone I did not know personally. The extent of my relationship to Steve Jobs is that I was one of those hundreds or thousands that sent an email to Steve at sjobs@apple.com in 2004 and he wrote back (unexpectedly) to start a brief chat. At the time he was battling pancreatic cancer, but he still found time to send back a note to a random user of his technology. I’d hoped that after a few years of growth at Digital Reasoning, someday we’d meet Steve and his team at Apple and find a way to work with them. If and when that day comes, he will no longer be there and only his vision will carry forward. Even so, parts of that vision live on in many of us beyond Apple as a responsibility to make technology simple by making it smarter and making it for everyone.

A friend and mentor of mine who had worked with Jobs in the early days of Apple had recently told me that Steve was a great “assembler of technologies” versus an inventor of them. The more I think about it, the more I see the wisdom in that description. Did he invent the MP3 player? No- but he put “1,000 songs in your pocket” before anyone else did in a form you actually felt cool to have and take with you. Did he invent the graphical user interface? No, but his team at Apple made it usable with major innovations such as allowing windows to overlap each other (something the Xerox Star OS at PARC couldn’t do)- giving depth and utility to the desktop metaphor that we now take for granted in all computing devices. Did he invent the tablet PC? No- but he brought a device to market that made touch a second nature interface combined with elegant software delivery to make iPads something that many families have for reading to games to light office work just two years later. He had a singular instinct to know when and how to democratize technology by making it beautiful and culturally relevant that only improved with age.

In a time when the role of America in the world is sometimes uncertain and looked on negatively, Apple’s products are a symbol that innovation and elegance that makes the world better still begin and succeed here. The irony of Apple outstripping Exxon as the most valuable company in the world over the last few weeks is an amazing metaphor into our civilization. One massive company selling something we have to have for civilization to continue being surpassed by a company that sells hundreds of millions of devices all over the world that no one needs but most of us choose is a testimony to the unique and compelling vision of Steve Jobs.

Democratizing technology is a calling of great moral significance. Whether it is Twitter allowing dissidents to escape the limitations of speech in oppressive regimes, or getting clean water technology into small form factors for impoverished regions, or protecting the privacy and lives of our users through better software that people can own – we have only begun to empower and improve the lives of humanity through innovation.

There is much left to do. Much more than we have already done. The world has computers and they are connected to each out. The ecology is in place because of Steve’s generation, but the Cambrian explosion of linking and understanding data is just beginning. And that should make us excited and driven – even as we are saddened by the loss of a trailblazer that came before us.

As I write this, I’m listening to “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel in my iTunes. If ever there was a “poet and a one-man band” of the technology industry, it was the two Steves of Apple. Now we say goodbye to the poet even as I type this email on a laptop his company designed and with music playing from a store he invented through a program that brought more music to the world than anything in history.

Life is short. Live brave and be fearless. You might just change the world.

There is no story of us without the story of 9/11. Even ten years after, words should be sparing. Our memories still speak to us more vividly than any writing.

The day was singular because all of us shared something that day where it did not matter our differences for a while after that morning. We were all on notice that the simple fact that we were Americans made us targets that day. We were one.

We shared heroes. And we still do. We have the great privilege to work with those heroes. Together we strive because we remember that any day can move from surreal calm to calamity in an instant. We work and we hope and we pray that our efforts hold back those days so long as we strive to our fullest. For ten years, we have had no days of calamity here at home – and this is not by chance or luck. It is the gift of heroes.

And on this morning- quiet for now like ten years ago, we can hear the echoes of those heroes that fell – from 40 men and women over the skies of Pennsylvania to 30 Navy Seals hunting the still vicious disciples of the killers of 9/11 in the heart of darkness in Afghanistan. I hear them say in the silence and peace they have made…

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

The way many companies did business changed in an instant on Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks ushered in an era of fear and uncertainty for government and businesses. Contingency planning for emergencies and disasters took center stage. Spending on security skyrocketed, and for some Nashville-area companies, that meant opportunities….

Digital Reasoning was a year-old technology startup with two employees before the attacks. Soon after, it became a key part of the United States’ global counter-terrorism initiative. The company’s information-sifting software landed a five-year, $7 million contract from the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center and helped the Franklin-based company grow to more than 30 employees.

“It was just a product or idea; what 9/11 did was give it a reason to exist,” said Tim Estes, founder and chief executive officer of Digital Reasoning. At the time, the weakness of U.S. intelligence agencies wasn’t a lack of data, the 9/11 commission later noted. Rather it was the inability to “connect the dots” of cross-departmental intelligence data. That’s where Digital Reasoning comes in. Its software is able to analyze massive amounts of data and find links that previously could only be discovered if someone were to actually read through it all. While demand in the intelligence sector shows no signs of slowing down, the company has begun going after new markets.

“Eventually every hedge fund in the world will want analytic capabilities that are the most advanced to make decisions for obvious reasons,” Estes said. “In the next year and a half, we expect there will be a lot of people investing in capabilities to understand data on the Web, data inside their enterprises for gain or for risk mitigation.”…