North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the promotion of MGen (USA Ret) Gary M. Jones, former head of the U. S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), to Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the company’s newly established Government Solutions business unit.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina – November 18, 2008 – Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in associative memory analytic solutions, announced the promotion of Major General Gary M. Jones (U.S. Army) to Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Saffron’s Government Solutions Business. In this role, Mr. Jones continues his current leadership responsibilities for Government Sales and will oversee the operations and direction of this strategic business unit as it continues to deliver next-generation solutions for investigative and predictive analytics to government organizations.

”We’re honored to have General Jones on staff, offering his great customer knowledge and experienced leadership to Saffron,” says Dr. Manuel Aparicio, Saffron’s CEO. “His role in leading a very special team in our Government Solutions Business Unit further solidifies our commitment to customer missions. Under Mike’s direction, this unit will be even more tuned and responsive to our customers’ highest needs. I am delighted by this promotion and the continued honor to have Mike on board.”

Gen. Jones joined Saffron in January 2008 as Senior Vice President of Sales responsible for leading Saffron’s government sales and business development initiatives. With over 28 years Military experience, Jones has managed programs and deployments at the national and international levels, with extensive operational expertise in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and the Middle East. Previous roles include Deputy Director of Military Operations for the Central Intelligence Agencies Counter Terrorism Center as a principal advisor to the Director, Sub-Unified Commander of Special Operations Command Europe and Commander of the United States Army Special Forces Command, a 9,700-person force with worldwide responsibility for fighting the Global War on Terrorism. Prior to joining Saffron, Jones served as Senior Vice President for Performance Materials, Inc. a company providing armor solutions and security solutions for the Department of Defense. Jones is an alumnus of Louisiana State University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and is a graduate of the Army War College and the Conflict Management and Negotiation programs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

To view a free, interesting and informative, 30-minute interview with MG (USA Ret) Mike Jones, in which he talks about SaffronAnalyst 5.3 and actionable intelligence from a soldier’s perspective. Conducted by Saffron Technology CEO Dr. Manuel Aparicio, the interview focuses on supporting professionals on the front lines whether military, law enforcement, or first responders. Viewers can hear Jones and Aparicio discuss how to:

• meet the needs of the intelligence community in wartime,
• improve collaboration between geographically distributed analysts,
• distinguish between good intelligence and bad,
• realize the benefits of database assimilation vs. database accretion,
• address the changes in intelligence information with alerts to tell you what’s new AND interesting.

The free video can be downloaded in three ten-minute segments at Aparicio / Jones Interview: Getting Quickly to Actionable Intelligence.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology’s Natural Analytic solutions for government and business meet and exceed the needs of organizations challenged by massive volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in multiple sources that require unified analysis in order to achieve their objective. Saffron dramatically reduces the time to get to “actionable intelligence” with their SaffronAnalyst™ and SaffronMemoryBase™. Government agencies in national security and businesses in highly competitive and risk-intensive markets rely on Saffron to help them ask the right questions and find the unknown unknowns in their data.

Company headquarters are in Research Triangle, North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.SaffronTech.com or call 1-866-472-3376.

27560
http://www.saffrontech.com
Saffron Technology, Inc.
Joyce Carroll

866-472-3376

North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the release of SaffronAnalyst™ Version 5.3, a new generation of its natural analytics platform. The release includes many analyst-requested features such as enhanced geo-rectification, social commenting, implicit expertise, and integration with Microsoft Office™. The company also announced the availability of a 30-minute online video to explain all the new features in SaffronAnalyst 5.3.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina – November 12, 2008 – Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural analytic solutions, today announced SaffronAnalyst 5.3, a major enhancement to its flagship product. The release includes several analyst-requested features such as geo-rectification with associative event analysis, global collaboration with social commenting, implicit expertise development in SaffronMemoryBase, and integration with Microsoft Office Word™, PowerPoint™, and Excel™ 2007. SaffronAnalyst 5.3 is designed for professionals who conduct investigative analysis across massive data sets, driving more time out of the analytic process and providing evidence-based decision support in one-tenth the time of other search and discovery products.

SaffronAnalyst 5.3, in conjunction with SaffronMemoryBase, dramatically reduces the time to analyze and discover entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. Users can quickly explore all relevant associations and produce new analysis and decision scenarios. Users can find the most relevant intelligence in context to the question – rather than simply answering the question, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 helps the user to ask it.

To help find the unknown-unknowns, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 enables analysts to “fly” through entity networks and segments of evidence, faceting down or pivoting around, to reach the answer to questions they didn’t know to ask, practically impossible with SQL.

Included in the new release are several features critical to improving the productivity of intelligence analysts, enabling them to get quickly from millions of documents to actionable intelligence:

• Enhanced Geo-Rectification. Unlike competitive products which provide two dimensional (lat, long) visual representation of an event(s) on a map, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 presents information about all related entities and supporting snippets associated with the location, in context of the analyst’s query. With Saffron, the analyst sees not only the events tied to the location, but how the events are associated with each other, in context of the query, with snippet level supporting evidence.
• Social Commenting. In addition to making notes on their own collection, users can comment on other analysts’ work product and public collections. While most other products limit social networking and commenting to workgroups, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 enables commenting throughout the network, as defined by the local users’ classification policy. User commenting incorporates experience and knowledge into, and become part of, the analysis.
• Implicit Expertise. SaffronAnalyst 5.3 learns the analyst’s interests, taking note of the way the analyst interacts with SaffronMemoryBase, so the application can alert the analyst to new relevant matters. In the case of intelligence data, the sum of the parts is not greater than the whole, so unlike products with a shallow representation of user modeling, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 learns the apparent interests of the analyst, identifies relevant data the analyst may not know exists, alerts the analyst to its existence, and recalls it as required.
• Microsoft Office Integration. Since many analytic reports are produced in MS Word, and operational briefings are presented in MS PowerPoint, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 exports the collected evidence, and comments to both, allowing the analyst to add their arguments for a complete product. Export to CSV format allows the analyst to open the results into a spreadsheet and still another way to conduct analyst and report from a desktop.

The company also announced the release of a free, interesting and informative, 30-minute interview with MG (USA Ret) Mike Jones, former head of the United States Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), in which he talks about SaffronAnalyst 5.3 and actionable intelligence from a soldier’s perspective. Conducted by Saffron Technology CEO Dr. Manuel Aparicio, the interview focuses on supporting professionals on the front lines whether military, law enforcement, or first responders. Viewers can hear Jones and Aparicio discuss how to:

• meet the needs of the intelligence community in wartime,
• improve collaboration between geographically distributed analysts,
• distinguish between good intelligence and bad,
• realize the benefits of database assimilation vs. database accretion,
• address the changes in intelligence information with alerts to tell you what’s new AND interesting.

The free video can be downloaded in three ten-minute segments at Aparicio / Jones Interview: Getting Quickly to Actionable Intelligence. In addition, readers who need more information can click here to download the SaffronAnalyst 5.3 Data Sheet.

"SaffronAnalyst 5.3 provides a suite of new features requested by customers," says Dr. Manuel Aparicio, company Chairman and CEO. "They know it's not a just a big intelligence world out there, it's a world made up of billions of small worlds with six degrees of separation. Like your brain, SaffronAnalyst 5.3 learns all about them and makes connections the analyst can't see. It helps them find the answers in the unknown unknowns, even when they don't know the question. For our customers, it’s all about the mission - taking timely, precise action to solve a problem – any problem. SaffronAnalyst 5.3 helps our customers get there sooner than any other product on the market."

SaffronAnalyst 5.3 is built upon SaffronEnterprise™, the command and control center of Saffron’s Associative Memory Base platform.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology’s Natural Analytic solutions for government and business meet and exceed the needs of organizations challenged by massive volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in multiple sources that require unified analysis in order to achieve their objective. Saffron dramatically reduces the time to get to “actionable intelligence” with their SaffronAnalyst™ and SaffronMemoryBase™. Government agencies in national security and businesses in highly competitive and risk-intensive markets rely on Saffron to help them ask the right questions and find the unknown unknowns in their data.

Company headquarters are in Research Triangle, North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.SaffronTech.com or call 1-866-472-3376.

27560
http://www.saffrontech.com
Saffron Technology, Inc.
Joyce Carroll

866-472-3376

Saffron Technology and Basis Technology today announced a partnership to integrate SaffronAnalyst™ for natural analytics with Rosette Entity Extractor for multilingual entity extraction to dramatically reduce the time required for an analyst to get to "actionable intelligence."

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC & CAMBRIDGE, MA - September 24, 2008. Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural analytic solutions, and Basis Technology, the leading independent provider of linguistic technology, today announced a strategic OEM/Reseller partnership to integrate the Rosette Entity Extractor (REX) for multilingual information retrieval into SaffronAnalyst. The decision comes after a significant effort by Saffron to evaluate a broad variety of entity extraction tools.

SaffronAnalyst is a thin client, Web 2.0 application that naturally bridges the gap between massive data sources by reading, remembering and recalling everything about all entities in the data. REX identifies these entities - the people, places, organizations, dates, and other high value words or phrases that express meaning in the unstructured text - from many types of documents. REX allows SaffronAnalyst to capture relevant associations for many entity types in multiple languages.

The partnership brings together best-of-breed technologies for linguistic data analysis enabling users to significantly reduce the amount of time between data collection and actionable intelligence, while producing a higher-quality intelligence product.

The relationship will focus on the defense and intelligence community and other government agencies, as well as businesses in the financial, health care, pharmaceutical, and other data intensive markets that can benefit from extraordinary natural analytics combined with powerful, multi-lingual entity extraction.

The partners recorded a moderated interview with Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO of Saffron Technology, and Steve Cohen, EVP of Products at Basis Technology highlighting the product features, integration, and customer benefits of the combined solution. The podcast can be downloaded at Saffron/Basis Podcast.

The companies also announced a joint product demonstration webinar on Wednesday, October 22, 2008. Interested parties will get an invitation after downloading the podcast.

"We're very pleased to be working with Saffron Technology in joining our Rosette Entity Extractor to SaffronAnalyst," said Steve Cohen, EVP of Products at Basis Technology. "They have created a powerful knowledge discovery platform that provides tremendous value to analysts and businesses alike."

Dr. Aparicio said, "Customers are the ultimate beneficiaries of this alliance. We're leaders in our respective markets, our competencies overlap, and our products complement one another - the synergy is natural." He added, "We're giving our customers what they want - the integration of best-of-breed technologies to achieve unmatched analytic results. Saffron and Basis share a commitment to the power and transparency our integrated products provide the market."

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology's Natural Analytic solutions for government and business meet and exceed the needs of organizations challenged by massive volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in multiple sources that require unified analysis in order to achieve their objective. Saffron dramatically reduces the time to get to "actionable intelligence" with their SaffronAnalyst™ and SaffronMemoryBase™. Government agencies in national security and businesses in highly competitive and risk-intensive markets rely on Saffron to help them ask the right questions and find the unknown unknowns in their data.

Company headquarters are in Research Triangle, North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.SaffronTech.com or call 1-866-472-3376.

About Basis Technology
Basis Technology provides software solutions for text analytics, information retrieval, and name resolution in many languages. The company's Rosette® Linguistics Platform is a widely adopted suite of interoperable components that delivers high-performance results to search, business intelligence, e-discovery, and many other enterprise applications. Basis Technology is on the forefront of applied natural language processing solutions using a combination of statistical modeling, expert rules and corpus-derived data.

Leading software vendors, content providers, financial institutions, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, name matching, name translation, and entity extraction. Our products and services are used by over 250 major firms, including Cisco, EMC, Endeca, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec. Our text analysis products are widely used in the U.S. defense and intelligence industry by such firms as CACI, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and SRI. We are also the top provider of multilingual search technology to web search engines, such as AOL, Ask.com, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo!

Company headquarters are in Cambridge, MA, with branch offices in San Francisco, California; Herndon, Virginia; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 800-697-2062.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the availability of their new “Unleash the Power Program” for U. S. Government Agencies in need of a low cost entry point for the operational deployment of Saffron’s intelligence analysis solution. Interested parties can download a free white paper from the company’s website that completely explains the new program.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina – August 6, 2008 – Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural intelligence solutions, today announced the availability of a new program for government agencies to quickly and easily acquire Saffron’s Natural Intelligence Platform. The offering includes three licensing options for Saffron’s software applications (SaffronAnalyst 5.2™ and SaffronEnterprise®), along with software maintenance, training, and implementation consulting services.

Interested U. S. Government employees can download a free, nine-page white paper explaining the program in its entirety by clicking on this link: http://www.saffrontech.com/library/landing/08_08-unleashthepower.shtml

MGen (Ret) Gary M. Jones, Saffron’s Senior Vice President of Sales said of the program, “Saffron’s Natural Intelligence Platform changes the way data analytics are performed and accomplished. Using this new technology, an organization can generate, collect and analyze large volumes of data. Being able to discover important yet sometimes subtle relations and patterns from the data enables them to create advantage over their threat base, adjust their efficiency to meet new challenges, and to produce complete, expedited results. Saffron’s ULP program gets them there immediately.”

Saffron began development of a next generation associative memory base technology in 1999. All efforts were focused on developing this new, scalable, data rich platform. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community have provided mission requirements to Saffron since its inception in 1999. Saffron continues to improve and enrich the analytic process with product enhancements and new releases.

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Natural Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

Saffron Technology, Inc.
Joyce Carroll

866-472-3376

Download press release in PDF format here.

North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the release of a new white paper entitled, “Natural Intelligence: Getting Quickly from Chaos to Actionable Intelligence,” which describes an innovative approach to information collection, exploitation, analysis, reporting and dissemination. The paper can be freely downloaded from the company website.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina – July 23, 2008 – Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural analytic solutions, today announced the release of a 23-page white paper entitled, “Natural Intelligence: Getting Quickly from Chaos to Actionable Intelligence. The paper can be downloaded from the company’s website by clicking [this link] http://www.saffrontech.com/library/landing/08_07-na.shtml

The new paper is written specifically for information or intelligence analysts or managers interested in new ways to exploit their already large and scalable data sets. The paper describes how Natural Intelligence reduces the “signal-to-noise ratio” in the analysis process by directing analysts towards previously unknown areas so they quickly see relationships that might otherwise require thousands of hours of effort.

Divided into six sections, the paper covers:

• The Idea in Brief
• The Evolutions of the Principles of Natural Intelligence
• Associative Memory: The Power of Natural Intelligence in the Real World
• Entities and Networks
• Case Studies
• Conclusion

“Today, Natural Intelligence is helping to address serious problems in government and business,” said Chairman and CEO, Dr. Manuel Aparicio. “If technology is to assist us in transforming data into information, and information into actionable knowledge, then it needs to also be more natural to the way we work: it needs to be more brain-like. A more revolutionary approach, inspired by natural systems, is required to address the growing problem of data and how to help us transform data into intelligence. We know this is only the tip of what’s possible.”

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Natural Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

Download press release in PDF format here.

North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the release of "Knowing What You Never Knew," an audio-slide podcast on natural analytics and SaffronAnalyst™ Version 5.2 presented at the 2008 i2, Inc. User's Conference by Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO, Saffron Technology.

Research Triangle Park, NC . (PRWEB) June 4, 2008 — Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural analytic solutions, today announced the release of a free audio-slide podcast on natural analytics within SaffronMemoryBase and Saffron Analyst, their landscape-changing intelligence analysis software.

The one-hour long presentation entitled "Knowing What You Never Knew" was conducted by Dr. Manuel Aparicio, Saffron Technology's CEO, at the i2, Inc. User's Conference in Arlington, Virginia on May 12, 2008.

The presentation includes a discussion of:

• The need for "…more brains, not just more automation."
• How to handle the "…tsunami of intelligence information."
• What an "…army of personal assistants" can do for an intelligence analyst.
• Building memories from "…a network of networks."
• Entity overload found in "…analytical balls of yarn."
• Inverting the "bathtub" to drive time out of the intelligence analysis process.
• How SaffronMemoryBase and SaffronAnalyst change the intelligence game.
• The potential for "anticipating events" via spatial prediction and anticipative alerts.
• How SaffronAnalyst integrates with i2's Analyst Notebook™.

"Dr. Aparicio's presentation at the i2 User's Conference resonated with his audience of intelligence analysts," said Gayle Sheppard, Saffron Technology's Executive Chairman. She added, "Their enthusiasm for our topic was measured by the number of attendees that remained after the presentation to ask questions. If you're an over-worked analyst, or you manage a group of over-worked analysts, you need to see this presentation."

The podcast can be viewed at http://www.saffrontech.com/library/landing/08_06-aparicio.shtml [Aparicio i2 Presentation]

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Natural Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

###

Download press release in PDF format here.

North Carolina-based Saffron Technology today announced the release of SaffronAnalyst™ Version 5.2, the next generation platform for natural analytics. SaffronAnalyst meets the needs of a broad range of government and business users by reducing the time required to collect, organize and read intelligence information.

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina  – May 20, 2008 - Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in natural analytic solutions, today announced the release of a major enhancement to SaffronAnalyst. SaffronAnalyst provides a user more time for analysis by eliminating the need to read and organize all kinds of content. SaffronAnalyst is a thin client, Web 2.0 application that naturally observes all available data sources and quickly captures all relevant associations between people, places and things. Beyond identifying these “entity” associations, its easy-to-use interface helps guide the analytical process while unlocking the value of data and other content stored in disparate systems and formats.

The new product features include:

• Collaboration capabilities allowing analyst knowledge, collections and experience to be shared across workgroups and the enterprise.
• A unique query to quickly identify instances of unusual similarity between people, places and things; or find groups of common practice or experiences.
• Enhanced geo-spatial relationship analysis through new export to Google Earth.

The company also announced the release of a free white paper entitled, “SaffronAnalyst 5.2: Unlocking the Value in Data, an Interview with Software Developer Jared Peterson,” which can be downloaded at http://www.saffrontech.com/library/landing/08_05-peterson.shtml [SaffronAnalyst 5.2 White Paper.]

 “We are very enthusiastic about SaffronAnalyst 5.2,” said Chairman and CEO, Dr. Manuel Aparicio. “It’s our flagship product designed for anyone doing investigative analysis across massive data sets. The collaborative features of this new release are just the beginning of what’s planned. Our customers must have access to the collective experience of their organizations while analysts must have access to the peer findings and ideas around shared matters. We’ve worked aside our users to understand how to help them shift their time from collecting and reading to analyzing. This new version drives more time out of the analytic process and provides evidence-based decision support in one-tenth of the time of traditional search and discovery methods.”

SaffronAnalyst 5.2 is built upon SaffronEnterprise™, the command and control center of Saffron’s Associative Memory Base platform.

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Natural Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

###

Download press release in PDF format here.

Reflecting its continued growth, North Carolina-based intelligent analytics firm Saffron Technology today announced the expansion of its National Security and Defense Programs Team with the addition of retired Brigadier General Mark V. Phelan as Vice President of Sales.

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina  – May 12, 2008 - Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in intelligent analytic solutions, today announced its continued expansion with the addition of a new Vice President of Sales for its National Security and Defense Programs operations.  Reflecting Saffron’s growing success, U. S. Army Brigadier General (Ret) Mark V. Phelan joins the company to increase the number of customers and grow revenues for the company’s suite of software and service solutions. He brings his extensive “boots-on-the-ground” experience to bear on one of Saffron’s target markets: non-DoD Federal agencies responsible for fighting the war on terror.

In addition, the company announced the release of a new whitepaper entitled,

“Associative Memory Technology:
The Potential Effect on Intelligence in Support of
Special Operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan -
An interview with BGen (USA, Ret) Mark V. Phelan”

The 10-page white paper, filled with General Phelan’s experience and insight, can be easily downloaded at www.SaffronTech.com/library/landing/08_05-phelan.shtml.

Brigadier General Mark V. Phelan retired from the United States Army after 30 years of commendable service; 28 of them as a special operations commander in Western Africa and Southwest Asia. He most recently led combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where his mission was uncovering and eliminating terrorist networks. Before entering the military he graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts with a degree in Criminal Justice in 1977. In 1998 he was granted a Masters Degree in Strategy and Policy from the Naval War College.

Readers can find a current photo of Phelan, and a more detailed biography at http://www.SaffronTech.com/about-executive-bios.shtml#phelan.

Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO, Saffron Technology, Inc., said “Mark’s extensive leadership and operational experience adds depth and breadth to the team. His years of service identifying terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Iraq along with his expertise in managing large analytical operations provide a unique perspective on how we apply our technology to meet our customers’ needs. We’re very honored and proud to have him join Saffron Technology.”

General Phelan added, “There’s a synergy. I’ve got the experience, Saffron’s got the tools, and I know how they work and what they can do. I think I add credibility to their product line. I can interact or engage U.S. government agencies with some experience behind me to assist Saffron in selling its product. Saffron has the potential to change the intelligence game.”

For additional information on this release or to schedule a presentation contact Toby Younis or visit www.saffrontech.com.

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Intelligent Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

###

Download press release in PDF format here.

Reflecting its continued success, North Carolina-based intelligent analytics firm Saffron Technology today announced the expansion of its National Security and Defense Programs Team with the addition of Senior Vice President Major General (Ret) Gary M. Jones.

Research Triangle Park, NC (PRWEB) – March 17, 2008 — Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in intelligent analytic solutions, today announced its continued expansion with the addition of a new senior executive for its National Security and Defense Programs operations.  Reflecting Saffron's growing success Major General (Ret) Gary M. Jones, Senior Vice President, join the company to grow customers and revenues for the company's suite of software and service solutions. 

General Gary (Mike) Jones leads Saffron's Government Sales and Business Development Initiatives for National Security. He brings proven, experience-forged senior leadership skills to Saffron after serving over 28 years with command responsibility at all levels of the Army's tactical and operational formations. General Jones has extensive international experience in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Middle East. During the Afghanistan War he served as the Deputy Director of Military Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency's Counter Terrorism Center as a principal advisor to the Director. He served in Europe as the Sub-Unified Commander of Special Operations Command Europe, and later as the Commander of the U.S. Army Special Forces Command, a 9,700-person force with worldwide responsibility for fighting the Global War on Terror. Jones was recently Senior Vice President for Performance Materials, Inc. a company providing innovative armor solutions and security solutions for the Department of Defense and other Government agencies. Jones is an alumnus of Louisiana State University where he earned a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice and is a graduate of the Army War College and the Conflict Management and Negotiation Programs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Said Saffron's CEO, Dr. Manuel Aparicio, "The leadership and operational experience that Mike brings to the company adds another important dimension to Saffron. In addition, he's an expert in analysis, with rich knowledge on how to apply Saffron's capabilities to the needs of our customers. We are honored to have him on Saffron's team."

General Jones, said "It is an honor to be a part of this superb Saffron Team and to bring 30 years of military and business experience to bear in building our sales and customer delivery capabilities while helping customers understand the immediate value Saffron can contribute in accomplishing their mission."

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc.’s Intelligent Analytic solutions, for both government and business organizations, dramatically reduce the time to conduct comprehensive, unified analysis and discovery of entities and their associations across massive, multiple data sources. End users can quickly explore all relevant associations in order to identify the unknown unknowns and to enable new decision scenarios and analysis. With Saffron, end users can find the most pertinent segments of information in context to the business question. Saffron helps you ask the question, not just answer it.

Contact:
Toby Younis
B2B Marketing Pro
800-657-1542
http://www.b2bmarketingpro.com

###

Download press release in PDF format here.

Companies Offer Entity and Predictive Analytics Solutions to Defense and Intelligence Agencies

HERNDON, Va. – (BUSINESS WIRE) — DLT Solutions, Inc., a value-added reseller of industry-leading IT products and services, today announced a partnership with Saffron Technology, Inc. to offer the company’s product line to defense and intelligence agencies. Saffron Technology provides powerful entity analytics solutions to uncover and clarify associations between people, places and things across enterprise databases, documents and disparate systems. Saffron’s unique memory-based solutions offer unprecedented scalability and accuracy to agencies charged with protecting our national security. Saffron Technology’s products are available on DLT’s GSA schedule as well as other procurement vehicles held by DLT Solutions.

“The ability to analyze massive amounts of data and make predictions based on the resulting information is vital to our nation’s security,” said Rick Marcotte, president & CEO of DLT Solutions. “Through our partnership with Saffron Technology, we are able to offer the most up to date evaluation and prediction solutions.”

Saffron Technology offers a suite of entity and predictive analytics solutions built on patent-pending associative memory technology. This memory-based approach avoids the inherent limitations and maintenance costs of existing rules-based solutions, enabling a variety of industries to benefit from comprehensive and accurate data analysis.

“We believe that at scale, there is no other alternative than memory-based entity analytics and prediction for the future of data analysis,” said Saffron co-founder and CEO Manuel Aparicio said. “Working with DLT, we will be able to efficiently deliver this ground-breaking technology to the people who need it the most.”

About DLT Solutions, Inc.
Founded in 1991, DLT Solutions, Inc. delivers best-of-class technology solutions to federal, state and municipal governments and businesses from its headquarters in Herndon, Va. To achieve that mission, DLT has tightly integrated itself with some of the most prominent IT software and hardware manufacturers in the world including Autodesk, Network Appliance, Oracle, Quantum, Quest Software, Red Hat and Symantec, among others. With its product portfolio and award-winning track record, DLT confidently supports public sector clients in the technology implementation required to achieve their agency missions. For more information or to place an order, contact DLT Solutions at 800-262-4358; email sales@dlt.com; or visit www.dlt.com.

About Saffron Technology, Inc.
Saffron Technology, Inc. provides breakthrough intelligence solutions using a patented memory-base representation, reasoning and recommendation technology that discovers, analyzes and predicts. Built to service the unique requirements of the Intelligence Community, Saffron’s associative memory base automatically reads all available intelligence data to help analysts organize and prioritize targets requiring immediate action. While Saffron reads and remembers everything, it incrementally learns as new data arrives, and provides total recall – in detail and context – about every person, place and thing. Based in Research Triangle Park, NC, this privately held software company is the innovation leader in entity and predictive analytics.

Fayetteville, N.C. (Oct. 19, 2007) — The Defense and Security Technology Accelerator (DSTA), a thought leader in business acceleration that assists entrepreneurs with the rapid development of dual-use defense and security technology solutions, announced today that two of their client companies, Anakam, Inc. and Saffron Technology, received contracts.

The contract is the first awarded to DSTA client companies. The DSTA framework was developed to bring together and leverage in a collaborative manner the capabilities of rapidly growing technology companies to deliver solutions that benefit the end customer and support economic expansion in North Carolina. The contract will enable Anakam and Saffron Technology to deliver key security and analysis capabilities to their clients. “Anakam is exited about the opportunities that stem from the collaborative effort with DSTA,” stated Brent Williams, Anakam’s CTO, “DSTA’s leadership facilitated the process, from its inception, of bringing companies together to deliver a compelling business solutions for our clients.”

Over the past year, DSTA has accepted 12 client companies into their program, four of which were recruited from out-of-state. In this short period, these companies have created over 70 jobs and are continuing to bring high-value business to the North Carolina community while training a new high technology workforce. Along with job creation, DSTA’s client companies are also contributing over $9M in revenues to the state’s economy. Manuel Aparicio, Saffron Technology’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer stated, “DTSA is directly responsible for helping our business growth, bringing more high technology work to North Carolina, and building a cooperative relationship between member companies that will directly benefit the war fighter.”

DSTA client companies range from small technology vendors to specialized service providers that focus on delivering innovative and specialized solutions to solve the challenges facing the defense and security marketplace. DSTA provides a variety of services for member companies and affiliates including facilities, product development, strategic planning, business development, collaboration, and recruiting. DSTA requires that member companies commit to supporting the North Carolina economic development efforts and enhancement of the regional technical workforce.

About DSTA:
The Defense and Security Technology Accelerator (DSTA), located in Fayetteville, N.C., is a thought leader in business acceleration focusing on military intelligence and technology. DSTA offers a program that assists entrepreneurs with the rapid development (8 to 18 months) of dual-use defense and security technology solutions to meet military needs and private industry demands. DSTA enables entrepreneurs to provide innovative defense and security solutions to the military and private industry while assisting its participants in selling state-of-the-art technology into the warfighter’s hands faster, ultimately saving lives and resources in the global war on terror. For more information, please visit www.dstanc.org

About Anakam:
Anakam enables strong authentication and identity management at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions, without encumbering your customers, partners and employees with cards, tokens, or fobs. The Anakam Identity Suite™ is unique in the industry, providing end-to-end capabilities that allow you to enable secure business to the masses. The suite includes two-factor authentication, remote identity proofing, professional credentialing, and data protection. For additional information, please visit www.anakam.com

About Saffron Technology:
Saffron Technology, Inc., based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., gives greater perspective and prediction to industries on structured, unstructured and semi-structured data that is important to them through a powerful, patented suite of entity analytics and prediction tools. Saffron’s technology provides Defense and Intelligence agencies powerful memory-based entity analytics tools to those protecting us from threats of loss and destruction. Saffron is also pursing new missions for the application of memory-based entity analytic and prediction solutions for the life sciences and health care industries. Today Saffron is continually identifying new and exciting applications for our associative memory base technology where the problem to be solved is complex and the data is large and rich. For information, please visit www.saffrontech.com

Dr. Manuel Aparicio to Present “From the Kremlin to the Coffee Shop”

Reston, VA — Asymmetrical warfare requires new ways of analyzing information to discover and disrupt emerging threats. On March 7th, attendees of Saffron Technology’s ExtremeIntelligence™ Manifesto Symposium will walk away knowing that now there’s a new generation of technology available to help them level the asymmetrical terrorism battlefield, thanks to the patented associative memory platform developed by Dr. Manuel Aparicio and his team at Saffron Technology. Dr. Aparicio will present the lecture “From the Kremlin to the Coffee Shop,” addressing how Cold War intelligence tools and methodologies are no longer relevant and must be replaced by an associative memory approach to intelligence discovery and analysis. Joining him will be an industry expert to discuss how “connecting the dots” is not good enough – and usually too late – and that data exploitation has never been more critical.

Said Saffron Technology’s Co-founder and CEO, Dr. Manuel Aparicio, “the world has changed, we are fighting a new kind of war. Old technology methods have failed and we don’t have enough analytical brains available to meet all of the challenges. New technology is required. Saffron’s memory based technology platform is the answer.”

The ExtremeIntelligence™ Manifesto will be held March 7th at 8:15 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Reston Town Center Hyatt, Reston, VA, 1800 Presidents Street, Reston, VA. To register for this event, please visit http://www.saffrontech.com/events.shtml.

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About Saffron Technology:
Saffron Technology, Inc. provides breakthrough intelligence solutions using ExtremeIntelligence™ - a patented memory base representation, reasoning and recommendation technology that discovers, analyzes and predicts. Built to service the unique requirements of the Intelligence Community, Saffron’s associative memory base automatically reads all available intelligence data to help analysts organize and prioritize targets requiring immediate action. While Saffron reads and remembers everything, it incrementally learns as new data arrives, and provides total recall—in detail and context—about every person, place and thing. Based in Research Triangle Park, NC, this privately held software company is the innovation leader in entity and predictive analytics. For more information, please visit saffrontech.com.

Download press release in PDF format here.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC—February 14, 2007—Saffron Technology, the innovator in Entity and Predictive Analytic solutions for National Security and Defense announced today that enterprise software industry veteran Gayle Sheppard was elected to the role of Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. Sheppard will be responsible for Saffron’s transition to the commercial market. She leverages 25 years of leadership with extensive global operations, sales and marketing experience.

Sheppard’s extensive experience includes global executive roles and starting and expanding business units in both the North America and Asia Pacific Regions:

• VP/Managing Director PeopleSoft
• President and CEO MarketMile, Inc. (now Ketera Technologies)
• VP Worldwide Sales J.D. Edwards & Company
• President, J.D. Edwards Japan KK
• VP Sales & Marketing Asia Pacific J.D. Edwards & Company

Her global experience extends across all continents. This experience, along with Sheppard’s expatriate time in Asia and Japan, provides a strong foundation for driving growth and creating value in the global economy for Saffron.

Sheppard has a proven track record of success and growth. At PeopleSoft, Sheppard was responsible for rebuilding her PeopleSoft business unit from an underperforming business into a top-performing contributor for the company.

At J.D. Edwards, Sheppard contributed to exceptional business growth—from $50M to over $1.0B—through the development and execution of new market strategies for vertical industries, international business expansion and leadership roles in global sales strategy and customer technology adoption.

Said Saffron’s CEO Dr. Manuel Aparicio, "All of Saffron is delighted by Gayle’s growing role in both the boardroom and the day-to-day activities of the company. As Saffron rapidly expands in the government and commercial markets, no one is better able to scale our operations and drive our marketing and sales. It is a personal delight and honor to work with her. I deeply appreciate Gayle’s confidence and experience, which will take us to another level this coming year.”

Sheppard also serves on several other civic and corporate boards including

• The Corporate Board of Directors for netCustomer, a leading provider of enterprise software support and services
• The Corporate Advisory Board for KeyMedia, Inc., a company that develops targeted online communities,
• Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business,
• Ackland Art Museum’s National Advisory Board and Ackland Guild’s Board of Directors and President. 

Sheppard is an alumna of the University of South Florida where she earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with concentrations in finance and accounting. Sheppard resides in Chapel Hill, NC with her husband and two Airedale Terriers.

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About Saffron Technology:
Saffron Technology, Inc. provides breakthrough intelligence solutions using ExtremeIntelligence™ - a patented memory base representation, reasoning and recommendation technology that discovers, analyzes and predicts. For the Intelligence Analyst, Saffron reads and remembers everything, incrementally learning as new data arrives, and providing total recall—in detail and context—about every person, place and thing. Based in Research Triangle Park, NC, this privately held software company is the innovation leader in entity and predictive analytics. For more information, please visit saffrontech.com.

Download press release in PDF format here.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC (March 27, 2006) - Saffron Technology, the innovation leader in Entity and Predictive Analytic solutions serving customers in the Defense, Intelligence, Aerospace, Health Care and Financial Services Industries, announced today it was showcased at the British Parliament as one of the leading technologies in the world to address Public Services, particularly National Defense. Saffron was granted an exclusive audience presenting to Members from the House of Lords and the House of Commons as well as representatives from The Cabinet Office, Home Office, Police, N.H.S. (National Health Service) and Local Authorities, at the Technology & Future of Public Services exhibition March 28, 2006.

This pioneering event examined the role that new technology will play in the provision of public services. The morning brought together companies who are leading in providing solutions to the public sector. Saffron Technology was selected as one of the leading new technology companies to address public services, particularly for National Defense.

The event was hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Mobile Communications Group and the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group. Chairman Derek Wyatt M.P. said, “I am pleased that we are hosting this ground breaking event in Parliament. This demonstration brought to Westminster some of the best and most innovative new technologies to give parliamentarians an opportunity to fully understand how they can be used to improve public services.”

Joining Saffron Technology at the event were Saffron customer Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, plus homeland security company, XTEK (UK) Limited, and Secure Briefing Limited (SBL), Saffron’s UK partners.

Saffron and Factiva demonstrated the investigative value offered by Saffron’s associative memory-based entity analytic solutions coupled with editorially scrutinized open-source information from Factiva. Factiva’s content, used by more than 80% of the Global Fortune 500, is an exclusive collection of news and business information providing extensive coverage of politically sensitive people, events, nations, and trends.

XTEK and SBL presented our joint “end to end” offering of “3D Intelligence”: Discover, Define, and Deliver. Saffron’s Associative Memory technology was featured, which optimizes the speed and accuracy, in which threats are discovered, securely communicated and defended against. Saffron’s Entity Analytics Solutions create insight into threats to national security, and address the growing problem of creating knowledge from the massive amounts of data available to organizations.

In attendance were both Parliamentary and other government agency interests. “There could be no better opportunity for Saffron to launch its products and partnerships into the United Kingdom. In meeting with members of Parliament, representatives of the Cabinet, and others, it was wonderful to see such strong interests spanning both UK security and UK healthcare. My sincere thanks to Parliament for providing this opportunity and to Factiva, XTEK, and Secure Briefing Limited for their tremendous support and representation”, said Manny Aparicio, Chairman and CEO, Saffron Technology, Inc.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., a privately held software company, is the innovation leader in Entity and Predictive Analytics solutions. With Saffron’s suite of products, customers learn new insight from the massive amounts of data stored across their organizations today. Saffron’s innovative Associate Memory Base technology discovers insights from data by accumu lating a memory of observed patterns and associations across events as they occur. Its flagship product, SaffronWeb, is an innovative entity analytics solution that helps analysts uncover associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information, working at enterprise scale in real time. SaffronWeb enables knowledge users to work more effectively and with significantly greater speed to produce verifiable, actionable results.

For more information, visit www.saffrontech.com.

About Factiva®
Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, provides essential news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable professionals to make better decisions faster. Factiva’s unrivalled collection of more than 10,000 authoritative sources includes the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times ®, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and the Associated Press, as well as Reuters Fundamentals and D&B ® company profiles.

Factiva’s innovative, XML-based and Web services-enabled technology platform provides access to this rich content collection behind the firewall that can be easily accessed, analyzed, and disseminated by multiple agencies. Government executives, information professionals, marketers, salespeople, and other professionals can easily monitor and understand the latest news, market trends, and business challenges relevant to them – directly from the Microsoft ® Office and job-specific applications they use every day.

For more information about Factiva, visit www.factiva.com.

About Xtek
Xtek, is Australia’s only publicly quoted Homeland Security Company, founded in 1978. It provides specialist equipment, training and support services to military, law enforcement and commercial clients worldwide. XTEK lead in the field of homeland security, with a growing portfolio of innovative products and a large number of exclusive product distribution agreements, backed with the provision of after-sales service, training, support and consultancy. Key staff members have distinguished military and police backgrounds and extensive experience in the Homeland Security market. Xtek established its UK office in 1992 and is building its footprint in Europe. Xtek will list on the London Stock Exchange in 2006.

For more information about Xtek, visit www.xtek.net

For more information:
David Baldwin
Director of Strategy and Marketing
Saffron Technology, Inc.
919-468-8201 ext. 113
dbaldwin@saffrontech.com

Download full press release in PDF format here.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC (March 17, 2006) - Saffron Technology, the innovation leader in Entity and Predictive Analytic solutions serving customers in the Defense, Intelligence and Aerospace Industry, announced the appointment of Gayle Sheppard to the Company's Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Ms. Sheppard has 25 years of experience in enterprise software and services, extensive executive leadership experience, rich international experience with focus on new market growth, and hands-on involvement with emerging companies, boards and academia. Ms. Sheppard's enterprise software experience includes the global technology companies of PeopleSoft, Ketera Technology, and J.D. Edwards & Company.

"The addition of Gayle Sheppard to our Board complements the technical expertise and technology thought leadership of our Directors," said Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO of Saffron Technology. "Ms. Sheppard is a seasoned executive with extensive experience in enterprise software operations, sales and marketing. She will be invaluable to Saffron as we grow our business and continue to redefine the market for Entity and Predictive Analytic solutions.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., a privately held software company, is the innovation leader in Entity and Predictive Analytics solutions. With Saffron's suite of products, customers learn new insight from the massive amounts of data stored across their organizations today. Saffron's innovative Associative Memory Base technology discovers insights from data by accumulating a memory of observed patterns and associations across events as they occur. Its flagship product, SaffronWeb, is an innovative entity analytics solution that helps analysts uncover associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information, working at enterprise scale in real time. SaffronWeb enables knowledge users to work more effectively and with significantly greater speed to produce verifiable, actionable results. For more information, visit www.saffron tech.com

About Gayle Sheppard
As a senior enterprise software executive, Ms. Sheppard has led the growth and development of several software companies in world wide sales, new lines of business and new domestic and international markets. Most recently, Ms. Sheppard was Vice President, BPO Strategy at PeopleSoft and the Vice President/Managing Director for PeopleSoft's Western USA business. Previously, Ms. Sheppard served as the President and CEO of Ketera Technology, Vice President Worldwide Sales at J.D.Edwards and Company, President of J.D.Edwards Japan KK and Vice President, Sales and Marketing of J.D.Edwards Asia Pacific Ltd. She is a member of Netcustomer, Inca's Corporate Board of Directors, the Advisory Board to KeyMedia, Inc. and an Industry Fellow at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan Flagler Business School. Ms. Sheppard is a graduate of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. She resides with her husband and two dogs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

For more information:
David Baldwin
Director of Strategy and Marketing
Saffron Technology
919-468-8201 ext. 113
dbaldwin@saffrontech .com

Download full press release in PDF format here.

Defense News

Posted 08/22/05 08:09

Where Data Hides in Plain Sight Pentagon To Take Deeper Look at Open-Source Intel

By WILLIAM MATTHEWS

The U.S. Defense Department is stepping up efforts to make better use of open-source intelligence amid evidence that the world is awash in valuable data that is not secret, is easily available, yet remains largely overlooked by U.S. defense officials.

The Pentagon has signed a three-year research-and-development contract with software maker Saffron Technology and information gatherer Factiva to automate part of the process of distilling useful intelligence from a deluge of data from ”open sources.“

Saffron, a six-year-old North Carolina software firm, says it will use artificial intelligence and data-mining software to filter valuable information from more than 9,000 sources made accessible by Factiva.

Software called SaffronWeb is designed to sift through vast amounts of data and find relationships that are not obvious, even to intelligence analysts, said Manuel Aparicio, chief executive of Saffron Technology.

Factiva’s role is to provide military intelligence analysts with access to its data, said Tony Hall, Factiva’s director of government solutions.

Founded in 1999 by business publisher Dow Jones and news service Reuters, Factiva deals primarily in ”journalistic sources,“ Hall said. It provides news reports from publications such as Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, broadcast transcripts, engineering and science manuals, and, more recently, blogs — the often impromptu ruminations and rants posted on the logs of Web sites on the Internet.

Factiva provides data from publications in 22 languages, Hall said.

Finding Connections

Saffron’s technology is breaking new ground in the instant, automated development of social networks. That is, it outlines the associations between people, places and things almost instantly as the new data arrives. ”That’s the real-world problem for Saffron,“ Aparicio said.

It’s difficult because the size of Factiva’s database, with 30 years worth of data, is enormous.

Saffron is building, testing and pushing the envelope of its software even as defense analysts are using it, Aparicio said.

The software also is designed to be ”personalized“ so that it searches for the information and relationships most likely to be of interest to each particular intelligence analyst using it.

When asked for an example of the intelligence that their software and data has turned up, Aparicio and Hall said they are forbidden by the Defense Department to discuss it, open sources notwithstanding.

They offer this as an alternative:

Last year, as the Russian government dismantled the Yukos oil company and jailed its executives amid charges of fraud, tax evasion and corruption, Saffron’s software combed through news reports searching for links between key individuals involved in the scandal.

The search discovered previously unknown links, including KGB connections between Yukos executives and government officials and marriages between children of key players, Hall said.

Is that useful?

”It could be,“ said John Pike, an intelligence expert and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, a military research organization. ”It indicates that all these people were in it together. It opens up new lines of inquiry.“

But open-source intelligence specialist Robert Steele said he is ”unimpressed by Factiva.“

Questions Value

”There’s a lot of value in Factiva if you’re a white, Anglo-Saxon businessman. It’s next to useless if you’re looking at terrorism,“ he said. Factiva offers ”mostly business periodicals in English, which are unlikely to yield substantial intelligence“ for the U.S. military.

Valuable open-source data is out there, but ”not commercially aggregated,“ said Steele, who describes himself as ”a former spy“ and the president of Open Source Solutions.

Useful open-source intelligence can be gleaned from obscure Web sites, limitedcirculation documents and sermons, and street talk. It is in data held by universities and private companies and collected by non-governmental organizations such as Doctors

Without Borders and the Red Cross, Steele said.

Factiva’s 22 languages fall far short of the 185 languages the Pentagon should be scouring for useful intelligence, he said.

Hall counters that published information has the advantage of credibility. Generally, it has been corroborated before it is printed, he said.

Steven Aftergood, an expert on secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, agrees that commercial databases ”barely scratch the surface of what would be considered open source.“

Nevertheless, they can be extremely useful, he said. And ”there’s every reason to believe that data mining and related technologies could be useful tools“ for discovering open-source intelligence.

Combining the two ”is a step in the right direction,“ Aftergood said. Open source intelligence ”is an underexploited resource.“

Open-Source Answers

It is a widely cited statistic that ”you can satisfy 80 percent of intel needs from open sources,“ Pike said.

”When you don’t have many human assets in a place, what you read in the papers may actually be helpful,“ he said. A significant amount of useful information on the Chinese military, for example, comes from Chinese newspapers, and increasingly from Chinese Web sites, he said.

Data from Middle East newspapers could be enormously valuable for putting intelligence into cultural context, he said.

Interest in open source intelligence is growing as the United States pursues the global war on terrorism. The 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks suggested creating a new open-source intelligence agency.

And in June, in response to a recommendation by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, President George W. Bush instructed the deputy director of national intelligence to create an assistant directorship for open-source intelligence.

Meanwhile, Hall and Aparicio said open-source intelligence is receiving attention from the major defense intelligence agencies, and it is beginning to be picked up by the military’s operational commands.

They said Saffron and Factiva have open-source intelligence contracts worth more than $10 million through several DoD programs. They refused to provide more details.

E-mail: bmatthews@defensenews.com.

Saffron Technology eyes new business

BY ANNE KRISHNAN, The Herald-Sun August 22, 2005 9:17 pm

MORRISVILLE -- Saffron Technology's software helps a military contractor resupply battlefields and the U.S. government detect aliases and investigate terrorism.

Now the 6-year-old company is on the verge of introducing its tools to help commercial customers find meaning in large amounts of information.

"We're the tool that really helps discover the links in how people, places and things are related," co-founder and CEO Manny Aparicio said. "We're reading everything, so the analyst doesn't have to."

Saffron proved its technology with its work for government clients including the Department of Defense. Its current challenge is translating its software's talents into providing value for businesses, Aparicio said.

The company's first targets are the health care and finance industries.

"The opportunity is out there and we're moving into it," he said. "This year, it's really getting fun."

Saffron's three products -- SaffronWeb, SaffronScope and SaffronSage -- have a number of different applications in a variety of different industries, said Noel Greis, director of The Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute's Center for Logistics and Digital Strategy.

"I don't know of any other technology that can do what Saffron does," she said. "The reason it's so powerful and so much better than the alternatives is that it can handle very large and complex data sets."

SaffronWeb takes information from sources such as databases, memos, e-mails and news reports and finds relationships between them. For instance, if an analyst entered several names related to the Yukos oil scandal, SaffronWeb would return not only information about those people, but also about other individuals or companies related to them.

"It connects them so that analysts can fly through the data and understand the relationships and find what they didn't even know to ask," Aparicio said. "It's kind of like search, but it's more like discover."

The second product, SaffronScope, helps the government connect people with their aliases.

"It's a very, very hard problem, when people are trying to fool you and you have multiple databases in different agencies," Aparicio said. "How are you going to boil it down into who's who?"

The software also is useful for data cleansing and integration during mergers and acquisitions, he said.

The third product, SaffronSage, can make predictions based on past experiences. It predicts gas surges for an oil and gas well customer and does real-time prognostics for military vehicles.

"It's the way the brain works -- you learn about the world and from past experience you reason through the problem," Aparicio said. "This isn't old artificial intelligence. From past experience, it predicts future events."

Aparicio was working for IBM when the company formed an intelligent agent and knowledge management center in 1995. Around the same time, Big Blue purchased Lotus, where Saffron co-founder Jim Fleming worked, and the men became colleagues.

By 1999, Aparicio and Fleming knew there was value in artificial intelligence that could learn from experience, but they thought there were problems with everything on the market.

"What was out there was inadequate for heavy lifting knowledge management," Aparicio said.

So they left IBM and started Saffron to develop technology that could handle harder problems. The development itself was a difficult task, and it took the men longer than they had expected.

"It's not easy having the breakthrough we had," he said.

Some of Saffron's first customers were in the U.S. government, and when Sept. 11 hit and the tech bubble burst, the company began to focus heavily on its work for government clients. Another longstanding customer for the company is Boeing, which uses Saffron's software for military logistics, surveillance and reconnaissance.

As the company broadens its customer base beyond its government clients, Aparicio has taken the CEO title and become the public face of the company. Fleming is now chief technology officer.

Within the finance industry, Saffron's software can help companies conduct due diligence during mergers and acquisitions. It also can help customers keep track of compliance issues related to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Europe's Basil 2.

"If a transaction triggers something suspicious, they can investigate who the people, places and things are, and what are the relationships and other transactions between these players," Aparicio said.

Health care organizations will use Saffron's software to track the informal networks between doctors, patients and drugs -- in essence, how new drugs get into the marketplace and are disseminated.

Researchers also are using Saffron's software to make sense of pre-clinical data for new drugs, Aparicio said. Cary-based iAdvantage has integrated SaffronWeb into its own eStudy technology to give researchers a quicker and more accurate understanding of their data.

Likewise, Greis and The Kenan Institute have worked with Saffron for the past four years to help the company identify other potential applications in the commercial arena. The company's software can be used in financial fraud detection, to identify best practices in business operations and to make sense of the reams of data collected by radio frequency identification technology at retailers, she said.

"They've really been using their time wisely to develop their technology and to use it in some very big problems, and now they've got some products that are ready for the realtime commercial world," Greis said.

Saffron's sales approached $3 million in 2004, the company's second year of profitability. That marked a 50 percent revenue increase and a 100 percent increase in licenses from 2003.

Saffron, which now has 13 employees, will increase its staff next year, mostly for sales and marketing but also for technology development.

The company also is starting to expand internationally. Aparicio will travel to London with iAdvantage next month for a summit. While there, he also will meet with finance companies and the United Kingdom's government.

"It's time to grow," he said. "We've been quiet. It's time to come out and expand."

Saffron Technology Awarded Contract with US Department of Defense;
Saffron Partners with Factiva on New Approach to Helping Intelligence Analysts Uncover Data

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Aug. 9, 2005 - Saffron Technology, the leader in the development of real-time associative memory systems, today announced a three-year research and development contract with the United States Department of Defense (DoD). The company will partner with Factiva®, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, to work directly with a DoD intelligence agency. Factiva provides open-source news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable businesspeople, and now intelligence analysts, to make better decisions faster.

The contract involves applying Saffron's flagship discovery tool, SaffronWeb, to Factiva's database of essential global business news and information to improve access to intelligence information and the way analysts can use it.

"Currently, there is limited access to open-source intelligence, and what is available is under utilized," said Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO of Saffron Technology. "SaffronWeb, through our partnership with Factiva, will give analysts faster access to associations within such sources."

"Factiva provides current information to 80 percent of the Global Fortune 500 to support better decision making," said Claude Green, deputy CEO, Factiva. "Now intelligence analysts will be better able to ensure that they see valuable connections between various pieces of apparently unrelated, open-source information by the application of SaffronWeb's link analysis technology to our comprehensive global content collection, which must be one of the largest databases of open-source intelligence in the world."

SaffronWeb provides the ability for analysts to sift through seemingly unrelated data and make inferences from the data connections that it creates and stores. By quickly uncovering distinctive relationships and similarities, SaffronWeb gives analysts a powerful intelligence tool. Analysts can also access their colleagues' user models to collaborate on queries and leverage the discoveries of others.

The three-year contract will provide DoD, Saffron Technology and Factiva time to evaluate and extend SaffronWeb's approach to data discovery and compare it to the manual process and other search tools currently used. Saffron and Factiva will provide interim case studies on their findings.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is a privately held software company that addresses information overload and data complexity issues with highly scalable, knowledge discovery solutions. Its flagship product, SaffronWeb, is a leading-edge discovery technology that helps analysts uncover associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information. It has the ability to mine millions of pieces of data to identify connections that draw users down a path of discovery leading to new insights, directions and conclusions - all in real time. SaffronWeb enables analysts to work more effectively and with significantly greater speed to produce verifiable, actionable results. For more information, visit www.saffrontech.com .

About Factiva®
Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, provides essential business news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable professionals to make better decisions faster. Factiva's unrivalled collection of more than 9,000 authoritative sources includes the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times®, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and the Associated Press, as well as Reuters Fundamentals, D&B®, and Bureau van Dijk company profiles.

Factiva's innovative, XML-based and Web services-enabled technology platform provides access to this rich content collection via Factiva's rolespecific products or through customized enterprise, group or personal solutions. Executives, information professionals, marketers, salespeople, and other professionals can easily monitor and understand the latest news, market trends, and business challenges relevant to them - directly from the Microsoft® Office and job-specific applications they use every day. Factiva's experienced taxonomy consultants are based in the U.S., UK, continental Europe, Singapore and Australia. To learn more about Factiva, please visit the Web site at www.factiva.com.

Saffron Technology David Baldwin, 919-468-8201, Ext. 113 dbaldwin@saffrontech.com or Factiva Shannon Sullivan, 609-627-2312 shannon.sullivan@factiva.com or Maverick Marketing Megan Haney, 919-459-2768 mhaney@maverickmarketing.com

Download full article in PDF format here.

June 16, 2005

First Coffee for June 16, 2005

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Daughters Of the Lonesome Isle, the 1994 John Cage collection of piano compositions played by longtime Cage pianist Margaret Leng Tan:

You know how most of the truly useful things in our daily lives – Velcro, laser technology, the Internet, Tang – were started as government-funded military or domestic security things? CRM might benefit from Saffron Technology’s “associative memory” technique, currently being used by the American intelligence community.

In a great article in the Triangle Tech Journal Elliott West writes that Saffron’s technology is “giving the U.S. intelligence community the ability to make connections from reams of data.” Sound like a familiar task? Using a technique called “associative memory”, West writes, “Saffron Technology’s software uses leaps of logic and makes associations that might otherwise be missed.” The company’s working with some government agencies including the FBI, who are participating in a pilot program with its software.

Saffron was founded in 1999 by former IBM hands Dr. Manny Aparicio and Jim Fleming, who set out to develop intelligence software: “The software allows [users] to see the big picture by putting the pieces together...from data,” Baldwin told West, adding that “it really learns more like the human brain does. It absorbs patterns and learns from what exists in the data.”

Baldwin calls this approach an “associative memory” technique, not the “rules based” methods commonly used to search data – “Find everyone with an Arabicky-sounding name living in Lackawanna who’s traveled to Pakistan in the past six months.”

“With the associative memory techniques,” West explains, “the software can recognize patterns and make connections between pieces of data that the human user may have missed or didn’t know existed. With this method, it can discover relationships quickly between data points found in massive amounts of data. ‘It gives you things that are related that maybe you didn’t ask for,’” said Baldwin.

With Saffron’s technology, Army and intelligence analysts “don’t have to read every single piece of information that is sent in,” which is physically impossible since “hundreds of thousands” of reports are generated daily, “but can examine trends and view the patterns the software found,” Baldwin says: “Our software can read all of that data and show them a quick picture of what happened overnight.”

Customer relationship management users are salivating already, of course. Patience – “Saffron is also investigating non-intelligence uses for its software and not surprisingly, one of those areas is in the customer relationship management field,” West says.

Its uses are obvious: Instead of tracking terrorists’ aliases, the software can make connections among reams of customers transactions currently underanalyzed or un-analyzable using current procedures to find “previously unknown trends.” Maybe there’s another diapers-and-beer gold mine lurking out there?

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If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content placement, but “appreciates” a kilo of Jamaican Blue Mountain Peaberry whole bean coffee.

Download article in PDF format here.

Updated version boasts commercial functionality, new features, and enhancements

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC (April 28, 2005) - Saffron Technology, Inc., the leader in the development of real-time associative memory systems, today announced the release of its next generation of intelligence discovery software, SaffronWeb Version 2.0. Previously deployed only within government agencies, Version 2.0 adds commercial functionality, opening growth opportunities in both commercial markets and the government. Saffronweb's discovery tools greatly enhance analysts' ability to manage and evaluate massive amounts of information and can improve their ability to convert data into valuable intelligence. Based on user queries, SaffronWeb captures experiences, learns patterns and builds memories to uncover associations and make predictions. It identifies and presents all information relevant to an analyst's query, which, in many cases, leads to new paths of discovery.

"We have designed a system that learns from users, with users and for users," said Dr. Manuel Aparicio, CEO of Saffron Technology. "SaffronWeb completely aligns with Jeff Hawkins' vision of the future of intelligent computing. We've already developed the technology and are expanding our applications - the future is now."

The future of intelligence technology has recently been brought to the forefront with the publication of On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins uses the human brain as a model, explaining that it is a memory system that stores experiences and makes predictions based on those memories. He asserts that this memory-prediction system will be the basis and future of intelligent computing.

SaffronWeb Version 2.0 has greater ability to integrate multiple commercial databases, offers increased transparency of source evidence for associations and has a streamlined user interface. It includes "snippet viewing," a new feature that provides an excerpt of the most relevant text extracted from a supporting document, allowing users to quickly assess an association's significance. Version 2.0 also enhances knowledge sharing by providing each user access to the expertise of other analysts. It captures the discoveries of each analyst, then shares this new information with other users as part of their query results.

"Any company, from pharma to CRM to finance, that deals with multiple databases and needs to make correlations between data can greatly benefit from using SaffronWeb," said Aparicio. "lim Fleming, our CTO, and our technology team have created an exceptional product that delivers clear, verifiable associations. SaffronWeb enables databases to talk, which can save and make companies time and money."

SaffronWeb Version 2.0 debuted at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

About Saffron Technology
Saffron Technology, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is a privately held software company that addresses information overload and data complexity issues with highly scalable, knowledge discovery solutions. Its flagship product, SaffronWeb, is a leading-edge discovery technology that helps analysts uncover associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information. It has the ability to mine millions of pieces of data to identify connections that draw users down a path of discovery leading to new insights, directions, and conclusions - all in real time. SaffronWeb enables analysts to work more effectively and with significantly greater speed to produce verifiable, actionable results. For more information, visit www.saffrontech.com.

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Download press release in PDF format here.

Saffron will be exhibiting at the GEOINT 2008 Symposium (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation)

2:15 - 3:00 PM “What Security Means in the Real World”.  General Mike Jones (Ret.) - Senior Vice President, Government Solutions, Saffron Technology, Inc. will be participate in a panel moderated by Lynn Mattice, Chairman of Emeritus Faculty, Security Executive Council, for The Partnership for Defense Innovation and the Defense Security Technology Accelerator, October 21, at the Embassy Suites Hotel, Cary, NC.

The PDI/DSTA Global S.T.A.R. Conference is the premier executive security forum for senior corporate executives, public sector leaders and industry visionaries engaged in global business, research and development, technology, financial services, defenses, security and innovation.

Registration deadline is October 14th. NCTA Members receive a special rate of $135.

For complete agenda, list of speakers and registration details, please click here.

Dr. Aparicio will speak on Wednesday 15 October at 3:30pm, at the annual AIPIO conference in Adelaide, Australia, hosted by the Australia Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers. The conference theme is “Improving Intelligence Tradecraft.” Dr. Aparicio will discuss how Associative Memory Base Technology enables the automatic reading and associative matrix analysis of massive data and documents – both structured and unstructured - giving the analyst more time for analysis that exploits this information. All the associations between people, places, things and events are read and remembered as entity-link connections across all the data, allowing for immediate recall and navigation of entities, links and their context, and supporting evidence of interest. In contrast, database stores are too commonly used even though this representation was never intended for analysis; massive data can be stored but is not then exploitable. Search engines index and retrieve documents and records, which the analyst must read and remember, which is the problem.

Dr. Aparicio will report a case study that drastically decreased the time it took to analyze multiple data sources and, therefore, time to act. He will discuss how Saffron’s Associative Memory Base technology is now leading to the identification and recall of patterns across networks, event sequences, and spatial relationships to further assist the finding of similar patterns and the anticipation of likely events.

Saffron will exhibit at the 2nd International Risk Assessment And Horizon Scanning Symposium or IRAHSS 08 will be held from October 13 to 14, 2008 in Singapore. This symposium aims to:

1. Promote active dialogue on RAHS concepts, methods and technologies
2. Share Singapore’s RAHS programme with an international audience and
3. Encourage active collaboration into concepts research and technology R&D and experimentation.

A technology showcase will feature state-of-the-art software tools from our commercial partners based in Singapore and from around the world.

Saffron Technology will be exhibiting at this year's i2 National User Conference. If you wish to meet with a Saffron representative during the conference, please to make an appointment.

Tuesday May 13, 2008- Breakout Session 4: 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Knowing What You Never Knew: Assistants that Read, Remember, Recall and Even Anticipate with Analysts
Dr. Manuel Aparicio, Saffron Technology

Analysts are overwhelmed with the "information overload" of documents and are now faced with "entity overload" - trying to find, understand and remember complex networks and patterns of people, places and things. Studies show that most of an analyst's memory and recollection of findings are lost within weeks of discovery. While the idea of having memory-based personal assistants to help the analyst is an old one, only recent technology and product advances now provide this.

Dr. Aparicio will describe how Saffron Technology's SaffronAnalyst works with i2 Analyst's Notebook to enable massive reading of documents, giving the analyst more time for analysis. All the "dots" are read and remembered as entity-link connections across all the documents, allowing for immediate recall and navigation of entities, links and their context and supporting evidence of interest. Dr. Aparicio will report a case study that drastically decreased the time it took to analyze and, therefore, time to act. He will discuss how this technology between Saffron and i2 will eventually lead to the recall of patterns across networks, event sequences, and spatial relationships to further assist the finding of similar patterns and the anticipation of likely events.

Saffron Technology will be exhibiting at this year's DoDIIS Worldwide Conference (Booth #902). If you wish to meet with a Saffron representative during the conference, please to make an appointment.

December 11 , 2007 - Associative Memories: Extreme Intelligence for Analytic Discovery and Prediction at ISS World Conference

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
1:30-2:00 p.m.

Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
5000 Seminary