Bangalore firm comes to CIA's aid SOFIA TIPPOO TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2002 11:36:32 PM ] ANGALORE: The world's most powerful secret service organisation -- the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) -- is dipping into the hi-tech expertise of a Bangalore company to give it more teeth. Stratify, earlier known as Purple Yogi, is working for the CIA to sift through the mammoth of unstructured information streaming into the organisation from a myriad sources. Some sensational, some plain hogwash. Interestingly, this project located on Bangalore's Airport Road has been funded by In-Q-Tel, an independent investing arm of the CIA. ``Working for the Intelligence Agency is a challenging task. The amount of information coming in is overwhelming -- there are so many e-mails, letters and sometimes just rumours sent in by their operatives across the length and breadth of the world that trying to make logical sense is excruciatingly painful,'' says Rakesh Mathur, who shot to fame when his start-up Junglee was sold to Amazon for a multi-million dollar sum. Stratify has developed a software which endows a certain method to the maddening deluge of unstructured data that comes into the CIA network. ``In-Q-Tel is building a portfolio of highly innovative and important new commercial technologies that can help tackle the toughest IT challenges the CIA faces today,'' says Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel President and CEO. It's evident that post-September 11, a sense of acute urgency has crept into the functioning of US' premier intelligence agency. It's largely believed that a robust software such as this would be able to quickly sniff a logical pattern in secret e-mails that land in the CIA mailbox. It is felt that if the CIA obtains a certain coherence from the mass of information that comes its way, catastrophes like the 9/11 one could have been averted. ``It is just not humanly possible to find a way out of all this unstructured data. Our software ensures that it can be done and more important is the fact that it understands different languages -- including Farsi, Arabic, French, German and others,'' says Mathur. Although the company has developed the software for CIA, it is still involved in the applications that go on top of it. One such application can be to get one page a day delivered to the US President. And, this one page comes maybe from tons of info that pours into the CIA office at Langley, Virginia and other centres. And, it is just not cloak-and-dagger stuff that this software is being used for. India's most admired company, Infosys Technologies, is another one of its customers. ``For them, all the unstructured information is used for creating business proposals and specifications as fast as possible, beating competition,'' adds Nimesh Mehta, the newly joined CEO who was a former vice-president of the world's largest database company, Oracle. The brains behind the project How is Stratify planning to become ``an Oracle of unstructured data management''? The hardcore tech-team consists of: John Lamping who holds original patents for structured access algorithms. Joy Thomas, who was a senior engineer in IBM's Watson Research Lab, who has authored books on fundamental research. Pandu Nayak earlier worked in NASA where he did original untethered spacecraft. Two founders are from the Microprocessor Lab, Intel. And, Rakesh Mathur, of course.
