While
all through the past few days the focus has been on NSA activities, the
discussion has often veered around the technologies and products used by NSA.
At the same time, a side discussion topic has been the larger technical
ecosystem of intelligence units. CIA has been one of the more prolific users of
Information Technology by its own admission.
To that extent, CIA spinned off a venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in 1999 to
invest in focused sector companies. Per Helen Coster of Fortune
Magazine, In-Q-Tel (IQT) has been named “after the gadget-toting James Bond
character Q”.
In-Q-Tel
states on its website that “We design our
strategic investments to accelerate product development and delivery for this
ready-soon innovation, and specifically to help companies add capabilities
needed by our customers in the Intelligence Community”. To that effect, it has
made over 200 investments in early stage companies for propping up products.
Being a not-for-profit group, unlike Private Venture capitalists, the ROI is
not the primary motive. Beyond funds, the startups have benefited from a government
organization association. “It’s an ego boost to get a phone call from In-Q-Tel,
but more importantly, it’s a direct path to major government customers.” states
Venture Beat’s Christina Farr.
The
investments usually are not more than 2 million $ and attract other private
venture capital firms along. According to an analysis on Linksviewer,
“In-Q-Tel has very few occasions where it has more than one common investment
with another investor, and zero occasions where it has more than two
investments in common.” Among the marquee investments in the past, both Google
and Google Earth have received investments from IQT.
From
its vast portfolio mentioned on IQT's web site, we list below the companies which have a cloud, storage,
search, analytics and/or Big Data footprint.
·
10gen: the company behind MongoDB, a leading NOSQL
database.
·
Adaptive Computing: offers a
portfolio of Moab
cloud management and Moab HPC workload management products for HPC, data
centers and cloud.
·
Adapx:
helps to collect data with paper forms, GIS maps, and/or all-weather field
notebooks using digital pens; software integrated with Excel, Sharepoint and
ArcGIS among others.
·
Apigee:
provides API technology and services for enterprises and developers
·
Basis Technology: provides software solutions for text analytics, natural
language processing, information retrieval, and name resolution in over twenty
languages
·
Cleversafe: provides resilient storage
solutions, ideally suited for storage clouds and massive digital archives
·
Cloudera:
leading provider of Hadoop distribution and services.
·
Cloudant:
provides “data layer as a service” for loading, storing, analyzing, and
distributing application data
·
Delphix:
provides solutions for provisioning, managing refreshing, and recovering
databases for business-critical applications
·
Digital Reasoning: provides tools
people need to understand relationships between entities in vast amounts of
unstructured, semi-structured and structured data.
·
FMSAdvanced Systems Group: focuses on visualization and analytical solutions,
as well as solutions in the area of Geospatial/Temporal Analysis and
Situational Awareness
·
Huddle:
provides enterprise content software with intelligent technology for
recommending valuable information to users, with no need for search.
·
LucidWorks: provides search solution
development platforms built on the power of Apache Solr/Lucene open source
search via enterprise-grade subscriptions.
·
Narrative Insight: provides automated
business analytics and natural language communication technology that transform
data into personalized stories.
·
Novo Dynamics: develops intelligent
information capture software and provides advanced analytics solutions that
transform data into actionable insights
·
NetBase:
provides semantic technology tool that reads sentences to surface insights from
public and private online information sources.
·
piXlogic:
has created software that automatically analyzes and searches images and video
based on their visual content
·
Palantir Technologies: “was developed to address the most complex information
analysis and security challenges faced by the U.S. intelligence, military, and
law enforcement communities”. Provides extensible software solution designed
from the ground up for data integration and analysis.
·
Pure Storage: the all-flash enterprise
storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data center
·
Power Assure: developer of data center
infrastructure and energy management software for large enterprises, government
agencies, and managed service providers
·
Platfora:
works with existing Hadoop clusters and provide business intelligence software
for Big Data.
·
Quantum 4D: integrates large data sets into sophisticated models producing moving
visual representations that enable users to identify trends, relationships, and
anomalies in real-time data
·
ReversingLabs: provides tools for
analysis of all unknown binary content which may involve removing of all
protection and obfuscation artifacts, unwrapping formatting elements and
extracting relevant meta-data. Results are compared against analysis
reports on billions of goodware and malware files.
·
Recorded Future: provides software which
utilizes linguistics and statistics algorithms to extract time-related
information, and through temporal reasoning, help users understand
relationships between entities and events over time, to form the world’s “first
temporal analytics engine”.
·
Signal Innovations Group, Inc. (SIG):
provides customers with an advanced platform for video analysis, including motion
tracking, enhanced metadata creation, and motion-based anomalous behavior
detection
·
SitScape:
provides software to assemble situational business dashboards based on
on-demand componentization and user interface virtualization of disparate
enterprise-wide live Web applications and digital assets.
·
StreamBase Systems: provides software for
high-performance Complex Event Processing (CEP) that analyze and act on
real-time streaming data for instantaneous decision-making
·
Traction software: provides enterprise hypertext collaboration software which
combines wiki-style group editing and the simplicity of a blog to provide
business and government organizations with enterprise software
·
Visible Technologies: provides
enterprise ready social media solution, offering a combination of software and
services to harness business value from social communities.
·
Weather Analytics: delivers global
climate intelligence by providing statistically stable, gap-free data formed by
an extensive collection of historical, current and forecasted weather content,
coupled with proprietary analytics and methodologies.
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