The Customer Experience Matrix is a blog which presents information about technologies and business issues that help organizations make the most of every customer interaction.

Saffron management recently spent some time with industry journalist David Raab, a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis, who authored this post.

‘Visual Experience Management’ Makes Big Data “Pop” With Meaning

McLean, VA & Cary, NC, May 19, 2010 –- Centrifuge Systems, Inc., a leading provider of next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) software, and Saffron Technology, Inc., a data analytics software firm providing associative–memory-based Experience Management solutions, today jointly announced they are partnering to deliver a graphical, highly interactive streaming data analytics and Business Intelligence solution for enterprises worldwide.  Both Saffron and Centrifuge were recently recognized as “Cool Vendors” by a leading analyst firm.

The integrated solution combines Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 and Centrifuge 2.0.  The offering gives customers in business and government the ability to apply associative memory to analytics and business intelligence — both via Saffron’s sense-making and decision support capabilities, and Centrifuge’s powerful visualization solutions.

The Companies are calling their combined solution, “Visual Experience Management.”  What is unique and most significant is that the system gains Experience in real time — it learns from memory and can remember and visually present everything — because of the nature of visual associative memory technology.

The cloud-ready solution, available now, has broad applicability to public and commercial enterprises across industry sectors.  Potential uses of the combined solution include: corporate, national and cyber security, fraud detection, financial data analysis, geospatial data management, customer relationship management, intelligence analysis, legal and litigation matters, B2B and consumer marketing, and supply and demand chain management.

“Visual Experience Management”

Overlaying Saffron with Centrifuge delivers rich, interactive visualization features such as bubble charts, relationship graphs, heat maps and time lines that give clarity and meaning to the memories stored in Saffron.  By transforming data into memories, memories into Experience, and Experience into graphical images, what results is a highly interactive form of Business Intelligence.

With Visual Experience Management from Saffron and Centrifuge, users can quickly connect to and integrate data from widely disparate sources into consolidated visualizations.  Data from public or private sources, enterprise or departmental data, geospatial or sensor data, indeed data across the entire Internet — including the Deep Web — can be ingested into Saffron, and graphically depicted by Centrifuge.  Users can find connections, similarities, groupings and patterns in their data, and see non-obvious relationships and anomalies in large data sets at record level detail.

The Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform

Built on associative memory technology, Saffron is the new framework for Experience Management, the business intelligence of the future.  Semantically connected, statistically rich with frequencies, free of traditionally bounded models of statistics and rules, and powered by service-oriented technology architecture, Saffron continuously identifies patterns and situations –– “Experience” — in data.  As new data arrives, new memories are formed.  Saffron learns incrementally about connections and frequencies among people, places, things and events. The result is a multi-dimensional, non-parametric, massively scalable, connection engine capable of helping companies achieve new breakthroughs in real-time consumer personalization, business intelligence and national security.

Centrifuge Interactive Analysis

Centrifuge provides freeform data exploration using charts, time lines, maps, relationship graphs (link analysis) and geo-spatial visualizations.  The link analysis technology allows analysts to show important relationships between data such as people, places, events and other attributes. By enabling users to connect, explore and visually share what’s in their data, Centrifuge delivers timely, accurate and relevant visualizations that enhance collaboration, performance and results.  The Centrifuge approach to Interactive Analysis brings together three important capabilities needed when performing data discovery: interactive data visualization, unified data views and collaborative analysis.

“Businesses today need effective ways to reveal non-obvious insights quickly. Users want products to be easy to use and implemented in days rather than months. We believe the unique Saffron + Centrifuge approach to Visual Experience Management is well-aligned with this growing need and has been proven in the most demanding applications in the world,” said Guljit Khurana, president and CEO, Centrifuge Systems.

“Traditional, rules-based or statistically oriented BI and data analytics solutions are falling way short in the face of today’s rapidly increasing data management challenges.  By combining our respective solutions, Centrifuge + Saffron are delivering a new and powerful way to capture, present, manage and apply what’s really in the data and use it for non-stop sense making and adaptive decision support,” said Manny Aparicio, founder and CEO, Saffron Technology.

Availability

The Saffron + Centrifuge Visual Experience Management solution is available now via SaffronSierra, a global developer platform.  For access and pricing information, and co-development and education opportunities, contact either company.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial services, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more. SaffronSierra is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developers creating new applications with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase^TM.  To learn more, visit www.saffrontech.com.

Saffron Technology. The World of Experience.^TM

About Centrifuge:

Centrifuge Systems (www.centrifugesystems.com) is a leading provider of next-generation business intelligence software that helps organizations discover insights, patterns and relationships hidden in their data. The unique Centrifuge approach to data visualization is called “Interactive Analytics” and brings together three innovations in analysis: Interactive Data Visualization, Unified Data Views and Collaborative Analysis. With Centrifuge, users ask open-ended questions of their data by interacting with visual representations of the data directly.

Traditional business intelligence solutions require users to define what they want to see in advance and present the results in static dashboards. With Centrifuge, users determine what is of interest “on the fly,” then manipulate the displays directly in a highly interactive fashion. The experience is refreshingly easy-to-use and the resulting insights can be extraordinary. Data integration has never been more flexible in allowing users to join disparate data sources without any complex programming or wait times.

Centrifuge is used in some of the most demanding applications in the world, including counter-terrorism, homeland defense, cyber security and financial crimes analysis. Commercial applications of this technology include fraud analysis, cyber security, performance management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, manufacturing analysis, clinical trials analysis and much more. Centrifuge is available for a free evaluation, either as a download or online, at www.centrifugesystems.com/company/tryit.php.

Centrifuge Systems. The Freedom to Explore.

###

CARY, North Carolina, May 4, 2010  –– Saffron Technology, Inc., a privately held data analytics software firm providing Experience Management solutions for business and government, today announced that it has been selected by Gartner, Inc. analysts as one of its “Cool Vendors in Information Infrastructure for Enterprise Information Management, 2010.”

According to the Gartner report, published April 22, 2010, by Dimitris Geragas et al,

“The concept of information infrastructure is gaining recognition with organizations seeking to adopt enterprise information management (EIM) principles and approach information management from a strategic point of view.” Such organizations include those engaged in financial and risk analysis, as well as national security, healthcare, manufacturing and transportation, and social media, among many others.

In commenting on Saffron’s inclusion in this year’s “Cool Vendors” report, Saffron founder and CEO Manny Aparicio said, “Saffron is honored to be recognized among the innovators in this space, what we call ‘Experience Management for the adaptive enterprise.’  Ultimately, we believe the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform literally enables you to find and apply the collective Experience hidden in your data to improve decision making and business performance.”

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.  Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability of fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

For more information about Gartner or the Cool Vendor report, visit www.gartner.com.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, healthcare, social media & marketing, and more. SaffronSierra is a global, developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase^TM and related offerings.  To learn more, visit www.saffrontech.com.

Saffron Technology.  The World of Experience.^TM

“Twitter is nonstop commentary on what’s happening in the world, and Saffron delivers nonstop data analytics,” said Manny Aparicio, CEO and founder of Saffron Technology.  “Tweets comprise ‘worlds of Experience’ about a given topic — money, Haiti, health care, or business intelligence, for example.  With TweetDive we are showing how Saffron 8 represents data, and how it can be used to make sense of data.  We invite all developers to come innovate with Saffron at www.tweetdive.com.”

Open-Source Code

Saffron is open-sourcing the code for TweetDive so developers can get a quick start, and see how easy it is to ingest data into Saffron 8 and apply the Experience hidden in their data to make better, faster decisions.  Visit www.tweetdive.com, or join SaffronSierra, Saffron’s new global developer community.  Saffron is offering developers 80 free hours on SaffronSierra, and after that pay-as-you-go pricing.  To get started on SaffronSierra, simply request an invite code, select a plan and signup, or contact Saffron toll free at 866-472-3376.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more. SaffronSierra is a developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase and related offerings.  To learn more, visit www.saffrontech.com.

Saffron Technology.  The World of Experience.^TM

CARY, North Carolina, April 7, 2010  –– Saffron Technology, Inc., a privately held software firm providing Experience Management solutions for business and government, today announced an expansion to its global strategic alliances program ––the Saffron Natural Intelligence Network.

The Saffron Natural Intelligence Network is open to commercial, public sector and academic software developers interested in creating and deploying Experience Management solutions using Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 (Saffron 8), the company’s market-leading associative memory technology for streaming data analytics.

“Customers today recognize the need for advanced data analytics solutions to manage the complexity brought by the unification of semantic web, enterprise data, geospatial data and the like,” said Gayle Sheppard, executive chairman, Saffron Technology.  “Saffron and its partners are creating and delivering today’s most sophisticated Experience Management solutions, all with one simple tool: the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform.”

Partners in the Saffron Natural Intelligence Network gain access to world-class expertise in the emerging technology arena of Experience Management, plus full in-the-cloud access to SaffronSierra, an open, collaborative learning and application development community.  Here, the world’s experts on associative memory technology are applying Saffron 8 –– including SaffronMemoryBase^TM and Saffron REST APIs –– for creating adaptable, streaming data-analytics solutions with elastic, enterprise-level scalability.

National security, financial services and global manufacturing firms, as well as research and technology organizations, are already benefiting. To see a list of Saffron’s current academic, commercial and government partners, click here.  For more information about joining the Saffron Natural Intelligence Network, contact Saffron directly or call toll-free, 866-472-3376.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more. SaffronSierra is a developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase and related offerings.  To learn more, visit www.saffrontech.com.

Saffron Technology.  The World of Experience.^TM

Cloud-based Associative Memory Platform Enables
Fast and Easy “Experience Management” Applications
Using the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform

CARY, North Carolina, March 30, 2010  –– Saffron Technology, Inc., a privately held software firm providing Experience Management solutions for business and government, today debuted SaffronSierra, a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service open to software application developers everywhere.

By joining SaffronSierra, developers gain full in-the-cloud access to Saffron 8, including SaffronMemoryBase^TM and Saffron REST APIs, Saffron’s market-leading associative memory technologies for creating adaptable, streaming data-analytics solutions with elastic, enterprise-level scalability.

“With SaffronSierra we are bringing the benefits of the cloud to advanced data analytics,” said Manny Aparicio, Saffron’s founder and CEO.  “Once developers see how easily they can access the ‘worlds of experience’– memories — in their data, and apply those intelligent connections in building powerful sense-making and decision-support applications, there’s no turning back.  We encourage all forward-thinking developers to check it out.”

Saffron is offering a 30-day free trial, plus affordable usage-based pricing plans.  SaffronSierra membership guarantees access to all the tools developers need to build and deploy low-cost, cloud-based associative-memory solutions.  Plus, the professional and technical transparency expected from a global software development community is assured through full product documentation, online support and issues tracking, and uncensored blogging.

To join SaffronSierra, go to www.saffronsierra.com.

With Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 (Saffron now available in the cloud, SaffronSierra members can easily and cost-effectively make bona fide sense of what’s really in their data.  And by applying all the Experience available to them –– both in their data AND in the minds of their users –– SaffronSierra members can build innovative applications that exploit this natural interplay to support better, faster decisions, and ultimately, better business performance.

SaffronSierra membership also covers open use of Saffron’s REST APIs for Reasoning Methods which include:

• Reasoning by Analogies –  Finding what is similar
• Reasoning by Connections — Knowing what is related
• Reasoning by Networks — Seeing how things are connected
• Reasoning by Classifications — Deciding how and where things fit
• Reasoning by Temporal Analysis — Tracking associated events and trends

Plus, by joining SaffronSierra, developers can invent their own analysis methods, and design new ways to apply the Experience in their data to better manage “big data” and today’s growing data analytics challenges.

From the associative-memory perspective, countless worlds of connected Experience — memories about people, places, things, events and timeframes — are hidden in your data, just waiting to be put to work.

With SaffronSierra, you can do precisely that.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more. SaffronSierra is a developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase and related offerings.  To learn more, visit www.saffrontech.com.

CARY, North Carolina, March 23, 2010  –– Saffron Technology, Inc., a privately held software firm providing Experience Management solutions for business and government, today introduced Saffron REST APIs for Reasoning Methods, five new query and application development solutions for Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 (Saffron 8).

Saffron 8, which includes SaffronMemoryBase, SaffronAnalyst and Saffron REST APIs, is the latest version of the company’s market-leading associative memory solution for Experience Management and streaming data analytics. Saffron REST APIs for Reasoning Methods provide immediate use of the business value inside SaffronMemoryBase, enabling better sense-making and decision support applications.

“When making decisions, people draw on their experience, and reason their way to an answer.  They search their memories for similarities, patterns or trends, to find connections.  By applying Natural Intelligence to your data, Saffron REST APIs work much the same way:  they literally reason, by applying the Experience in your data toward solving your most critical problems,” said Manny Aparicio, CEO and Founder of Saffron Technology.

Saffron’s powerful, simple, flexible and comprehensive REST API’s include administration and application APIs, as well as ingestion and query APIs.  Saffron APIs perform a broad range of applied reasoning functions to rapidly deliver everything from low-level data extraction to high-level trends analysis, and much more.

Some of the Reasoning Methods for accessing and applying the Experience in your data using SaffronMemoryBase include:

• Reasoning by Analogies –  Finding what is similar
• Reasoning by Connections — Knowing what is related
• Reasoning by Networks — Seeing how things are connected
• Reasoning by Classifications — Deciding how and where things fit
• Reasoning by Temporal Analysis — Tracking associated events and trends

These and other partner-developed REST APIs are available with Saffron 8.  Plus, with Saffron 8 it is easy to invent new analysis methods, and new ways of applying the Experience in your data toward solving today’s growing data analytics challenges.

For more information about Saffron REST APIs, visit us at www.saffrontech.com, or sign up for SaffronSierra, our global developer community.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues.  Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more.

Biologically inspired, the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform is a revolutionary approach to data analysis. SaffronMemoryBase understands and recalls the co-occurrences and the frequencies of entity associations in varied, massive data sets at unprecedented recall speed.  SaffronSierra is a developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase and related offerings.  www.saffrontech.com

CARY, North Carolina — March 10, 2010 — Saffron Technology, Inc., a privately held software firm providing Experience Management solutions for business and government, today announced General Availability of Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 (“Saffron 8”).

Saffron 8 is the commercial market’s first cloud-ready representation and reasoning solution built entirely on associative memory technology; the first to scale to the enterprise level; and the only associative memory base that can capture all possible connections within a massive data set in real time. WIth it, customers can make sense of what’s really in their data, support better, faster decisions, and anticipate logical scenarios by applying all the Experience naturally available to them — both in their data, and in the perspectives of their users.

“With today’s data deluge, every enterprise is seeking better business sense-making and decision-making tools,” said Manny Aparicio, CEO, Saffron Technology. “Saffron 8 is a single-store solution that moves companies beyond age-old batch data mining or fragmented, multi-store business intelligence approaches, and into Experience Management. Saffron 8 stores the connections and frequencies in all your data, providing a dynamic resource where, thanks to the natural interplay between system and user, Experience is continuously in the making.”

In Saffron 8, Saffron Technology has engineered a proprietary distributed associative memory store and map-reduce ingestion process, allowing it to scale to billions of connections and capable of solving enterprise-scale problems. Saffron 8’s new architecture is an adaptive, streaming data analytics solution that is immediately queryable in sense-making and decision-support, and easily integrates with legacy and next-generation software applications. Because Saffron 8 ingests live source data and makes it available to decision makers in real time, the system continually gets smarter every minute of use.

Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 includes SaffronMemoryBase, SaffronAnalyst, and Saffron REST APIs for data ingestion and query. Technologists and developers can learn more by experimenting with Saffron 8 directly, at www.saffronsierra.com. Or visit www.tweetdive.com to see how SaffronMemoryBase reveals informative data connections and associations, using the world of Twitter as a data source.

About The Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform

Built on associative memory technology, Saffron 8 provides business, government and academic customers vastly more powerful data analysis capability at far lower cost of ownership than other post-relational data management solutions. This is due to Saffron’s massively parallel data-store distribution capability, which goes well beyond traditional business intelligence or search solutions, beyond databases, statistics and rules, to deliver Experience Management.

In Saffron’s view, countless worlds of connected Experience — memories — about people, places, things and events, are hidden in your data, waiting to be put to work. With Saffron 8, you can access, control and manage all that Experience, and analyze it, learn from it, remember it and leverage it, all across your business.

“Customers expect applications with limitless scale that can easily be integrated into their current technology architecture,” Aparicio said. “Saffron 8 integrates easily with third-party ETL applications on the back end, and with presentation and reporting tools on the front end. It is built on current standards for componentization, to openly incorporate modern tools such as REST interfaces for SOA integration, and service and user-interface mash-ups for complete flexibility.”

Saffron’s REST APIs for Reasoning Methods provide application and utility views of SaffronMemoryBase for rapid application development. With Saffron 8 you can invent new analysis methods and new ways of applying the Experience in your data toward solving even your most challenging business analytics problems.

Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform Version 8.0 has been completely redesigned to deliver high scalability, improved performance and real-time streaming analytics. System maintenance and administration have been improved, and open application integration has been simplified. To learn more, go to www.saffrontech.com, or call toll free 866-472-3376. Or register for our blog, SaffronThreads.

About Saffron Technology

Saffron helps business and IT leaders use the collective Experience hidden in their data to better understand business scenarios, determine best possible courses of action, and make higher value decisions about critical business issues. Our customers are innovators, in academia, corporations and government. They are engaged in high-stakes research, financial analysis, risk management, supply chain operations, national security, health care, social media & marketing, and more.

Biologically inspired, the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform is a revolutionary approach to data analysis. SaffronMemoryBase understands and recalls the co-occurrences and the frequencies of entity associations in varied, massive data sets at unprecedented recall speed. SaffronSierra is a developer-focused Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with the Saffron Natural Intelligence Platform, including SaffronMemoryBase and related offerings. www.saffrontech.com