Skylertech @ DEMO2006

Filed in archive Technology on October 13, 2005

Another promising startup that we spotted at DEMO 2006 is Skylertech. Here is an interview with the presenters Valerie Bannert-Thurner and Michael Lenahan.

Please describe your company's product and services?Skyler utilizes its unique Prime Processing technology to provide our current customers and partners with business analytics solutions for faster, higher quality decision-making. Currently, Skyler's Prime Processing technology has been extended into two analytical engines, a real-time data processing engine for the Financial Services Industry and a content filtering engine for the Healthcare Services Industry.

1.) Skyler's real-time data processing engine
Skyler's real-time engine takes in trade data, encodes them into a compressed proprietary Skyler representation and filters, queries and pattern matches data at unprecedented levels of speed and sophistication. The engine provides customers the ability to query data in memory at extremely high rates in an ad hoc manner. The engine is highly configurable and scales with increasing data volumes and data sizes, formats & structures. The engine is and will be applied to real-time historic data analysis, stream processing and real-time caching.

2.) Skyler's content filtering engine
Skyler has also developed a content filtering engine to enable efficient and accurate sorting of text based information to enable automated decision making for the Healthcare Services Industry. Skyler's content filtering engine excels through its ability to sort text based content into a variety of different categories with unprecedented levels of accuracy and at high speeds, process text independently of the language used, and intelligently learn and improve its sorting capability. The engine is also highly robust in its ability to control for spelling mistakes and language mutations.

Both of Skyler's engines are well-suited to the current demand to process skyrocketing volumes of data in an ever decreasing time frame with high levels of sophistication.

The benefits for the customers include faster and smarter decision making, increased business agility, improved operational efficiency, higher profitability, lower ROI, ability to grow your business

What is the new service that SkylerTech provides?

Skyler real-time engine -- new service
The uniqueness of Skyler's real-time engine lies in the combination of the ability for the user to
� Query data in memory at very high speeds (>100 million records / second)
� Query data in an extremely flexible manner: simple and complex queries achieve similar speeds, any kinds of queries can be asked -- no use of a relational model, limited use of traditional indexes
� Query more data in memory due to the inherent compression ability

Where do you see your value proposition and innovation in particular?Innovation (and patents) lies in Skyler's Prime Processing:
Skyler's Prime Processing� is suite of data processing technologies that represents breakthroughs in the fundamental representation and manipulation of information. Prime Processing encodes structured, semi-structured and unstructured data into a numeric representation, combining context and content without the loss of information. The Prime Processing suite of technologies encodes, filters, queries, and pattern matches information, providing higher quality decision making at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

This sounds very general what else can you use your technology for?
Skyler's data encoding and highly efficient search and sort operations can be applied to pattern recognition in media content such as video or audio. These are research projects or prototypes the Skyler lab is working on.

Why is your real-time querying engine faster than anybody else's?Our engine achieves over 100 million records queries in an ad hoc manner.
The engine is faster due to the following facts:
- A clean sheet design solution built to take advantage of modern computing platforms
- No classic overhead imposed by traditional relational databases
- Data representations tailored towards modern computing platforms
- Inherent data compression with Skyler's encoding
- Novel and proprietary search algorithms leveraging Skyler's unique data representations

As far as I understand data must be transported from a clients' database into your data storage in order to make the analysis work. How do ensure real-time transmission of these huge databases?Generally the engine is capable to take in data from multiple sources: from disk, from a db or from one or multiple streams.
If we take data from a db, depending on the customer requirements we can either build a direct interface to the database -- which we might do in the future.

Why is Skyler different than a database index?As you know, indexes are used to speed up querying performance. The problem with indexes however is that they can become quite large so you want to limit the number of indexes used and they are hard to maintain. Therefore you become limited in your querying flexibility as well as in your insert performance.
Skyler's core engine does not need to use indexes even though nothing precludes us to combine the core data processing approach with the conventional use of indexes.
Our compact encoding and the according pattern matching operations are so highly efficient that we can afford to query the data without using indexes -- giving you nearly limitless querying flexibility.

How many customers do you expect to use Skyler's product within one year from now?

At the moment we are in discussions with several leading players within the FS industry to benchmark and implement our real-time engine.
The tremendous response we have received after DEMOfall implies that within one year we will certainly engage several more customers including ECNs, Hedge funds, information vendors and brokerage houses.

What are the investors in Skyler?Skyler is privately held currently funded by Angels, we seek additional capital in Q1.

What are your future plans?Skyler is focused on extending the capabilities of its real-time engine for the Financial Services Industry and its content filtering engine for the Healthcare Services Industry, as well as seeking out partners and customers in these industries. Skyler will also explore other opportunities in vertical markets and as an engine for existing business analytics vendors' solutions. Skyler plans to become a leader in the business analytics market, serving a broad range of industries with solutions that empower our customers with smarter, higher quality business decisions.