Featured Company: Siderean Software
Posted: 4/30/07
www.siderean.com
By Bradley Allen, Founder and CTO
The information value chain is changing rapidly. In today’s network-centric enterprise much of the critical information is unstructured, often resides outside the enterprise and is not readily managed 
or controlled in the traditional IT sense. Additionally, dynamic online information is exploding. Users want to contribute and have a choice in filtering and managing it. Information aggregators are gaining mind and traffic share with subscription and advertising dollars following those eyeballs.
Users continue to struggle with discovery of and repeatable access to the information they need to make informed decisions. Furthermore, enterprise, web and user-generated data and content are converging, and this is making discovery and access even harder. Search alone is inefficient, insufficient, and usually unacceptable to meet the more demanding requirements of the enterprise. Ultimately people want to see the full scope of information available, find what they want, discover what they didn’t know but should have and choose their own ways to filter and share information.
Siderean’s flagship product, Seamark Navigator, allows enterprises to give their users a unified view of what is available, allowing them to zero in on relevant content, find and follow relationships and share discoveries with others. This is a huge leap forward in making information actionable, benefiting enterprises by reducing costs, enhancing revenue and managing information assets more effectively.
Traditional search simply doesn’t show users the scope of available information. Guided navigation provides users with some scope, but only along fixed views predetermined by marketing or IT. Relational navigation, pioneered by Siderean, allows users to see, explore and contribute to the full scope of available information. No other vendor in the information access market can deliver this capability today.
Siderean currently has 24 customers in total, with the focus being the media and publishing, high technology and federal markets. The company’s lighthouse accounts in these markets are Elsevier, Oracle and the National Security Agency, respectively.
According to IDC, enterprise information access software is today a $1.2 billion market with 21 percent CAGR, growing to $2.5 billion by 2010. Navigation accounts for about 10 percent of this market today. As search becomes increasingly commoditized, the navigation segment will grow to dominate the category over the next five years. Siderean is in the enviable position to lead that market with the definitive solution for navigation.
Relational navigation has revolutionized traditional search by allowing organizations to intelligently locate the information they need to make good business decisions. Siderean’s solutions aggregate data from structured and unstructured sources and organize it, allowing users to navigate content from a “bird’s eye” perspective – a big picture view of all the information available – to drill down to the “bug’s eye” view – the specific dataset users are looking for. This gives knowledge workers a high-level perspective, suddenly letting them discover things they don’t know that they should know. Ultimately this ability to discover unexplored information adds significant value to the individual knowledge worker as well as the enterprise at large.
Siderean’s patented relational navigation technology provides meaningful labels that reflect the concepts relevant to a domain. These labels are represented as “metadata” and are either created manually or assigned automatically to documents or other resources. Relational navigation systems have the characteristics of being coherent and complete. This provides an advantage over traditional search which typically produces long lists of results with very little context.
The heart of Seamark Navigator is a patent-protected relational navigation engine based on W3C standards for the semantic web. Delivering immediate time-to-value, it scales to tens of billions of relations and has out-of-the-box integration with multiple search engines, content repositories, databases, Web services and feeds. It is the first enterprise-class application to deliver the benefits of Semantic Web technology.
Our management team, led by myself and Michael Schmitt, president and CEO, is distinguished by its long experience in growing enterprise software companies and delivering bleeding-edge software products and solutions to large enterprises. Backed by leading venture capital firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures, Allen founded Siderean in 2001.
Company In Brief
Company: Siderean Software, Inc.
Market category: Information Access
Headquarters: El Segundo, CA
Direct employees: 22
Contract employees: 12
Year founded: 2001
Management Team
Michael Schmitt, President and CEO, former CMO, Ariba
Bradley Allen, Founder and CTO, former CTO, TriVida (acquired by Be Free)
Jack Berkowitz, VP Engineering, former VP Engineering, Cerebra (acquired by webMethods)
Brian Anderson, VP Marketing, former VP Marketing, Avamar (acquired by EMC)
Ivan Ivankovich, CFO, former CFO, YellowPages.com
Michael DiLascio, Director Sales, former VP Sales, Tucana
Robert MacGregor, Chief Scientist, former Senior Project Leader, USC ISI
