Qbase is a privately held software products and services company that formed in 2005. Since 2010, it has grown eight times in size. In September, the company announced the rebranding of its products division as Synthos Technologies, with the goal of ultimately transforming it into a new wholly owned corporate entity.
Approximately 50 of Qbase’s several hundred employees are now part of Synthos Technologies, which is headquartered in Reston, VA. They plan to add to the team over the next couple of months.
Necessity Breeds Invention
Synthos Technologies has an area of focus for their early days, which involves developing an end-to-end, in-memory database platform with embedded analytics. The product is designed for use with unstructured data, drawing on several existing Qbase technologies as well as new ones.
The need to manage unstructured data drove Qbase to establish Synthos Technologies, and is also driving to lead project. “We see a huge opportunity in unstructured text. It’s estimated that nearly 90 percent of the world’s data is unstructured. And that organizations today generate more data in just 10 minutes than in all of 2003,” explains Erin-Michael Gill, CEO, Synthos Technologies.
Until now, Gill says, companies have relied on database management systems to manage all the information they possess or create. Those systems are either SQL, for structured data, and NoSQL for everything else. But there was a fly in the proverbial ointment. “We heard time and again from our customers, and from the market, that database technology was falling short for the data environment in which we live. And the pace at which we’re creating data isn’t going to slow down. The only option is to create something new. Something that changes the game.”
Synthos Technologies new product builds off the company’s existing in-memory database platform and allows users to search millions of documents and find billions of entities. Moreover, it lets users see the connections between the information. In other words, the product can “turn average people into data scientists by allowing them to move from simply searching data to making sense of it,” asserts Gill.
Naturally, speed is critical for a system that processes massive amounts of data and enables information analysis. Being memory-based allows the product to be incredibly fast. “In our case, this means reading and making sense of more than 700 documents every minute—discovering over 350 unique, specific, people, place, and organizational entities every second,” says Gill.
Qbase has strong relationships with the federal government, such as the intelligence community, and identified places for Synthos Technologies to grow within the federal market. However, it is also planning to grow in other areas. “The financial industry is an obvious target for in-memory technology just because of the demand for rapid transaction processing and analysis there. Retail is another natural fit. We’re also getting some great industry analyst feedback on our technology pointing us toward the healthcare, utility, and transportation arenas. We certainly see applications for it there and are initiating the conversations we need to have,” says Gill.
Some of the components used in the platform could eventually become stand-alone products, notes Gill, including a new, native in-memory NoSQL database, an entity extraction, and disambiguation engine.
Synthos Technologies may be a new division, but Qbase has plenty of previous experience with data platforms. They acquired MetaCarta in 2010, and the MetaCarta product has served Qbase well as a leading geo-intelligence software product. MetaCarta is similar to the forthcoming Synthos Technologies platform—both are inspired by the need to extract meaningful information from massive amounts of data.
Crossroads
By rebranding its products division as Synthos Technologies, Qbase demonstrates a new level of focus. Companies seeking to leverage data with deeper understanding will want to look out for Synthos Technologies’ forthcoming platform. SW
Oct2014, Software Magazine
