Chiliad Offline: A Precursor for Other BI Outfits
October 13, 2014
According to PacerMonitor, Chiliad, Inc. filed for bankruptcy on August 6, 2014. As you may recall, the company was a Washington, DC area analytics firm founded by Christine Maxwell of McKinley Group and Magellan fame. (Magellan became part of Excite, which also faded away.)
About two years ago, Beyond Search wrote about Chiliad and its big rocks. Also, in 2012, the company named Craig Norris, as chief executive officer. Mr. Norris (an industry leader according to Reuters) had been the CEO of Attensity, sentiment analysis outfit, which has experienced its share of strong headwinds. In the news release about his appointment, he said:
“I am excited to be joining Chiliad at an important stage in its growth. What makes or breaks an analytics company is the quality and usability of its core technology. Chiliad’s offering has proven its ability to extract critical findings from data at massive scale for both Government and Commercial customers. I am eager to see us gain recognition for our technology leadership.”
The news release included assertions by Patrick Gross (Chairman of the Chiliad board of directors) that I have encountered many times in the last five years; to wit:
“Chiliad has already solved two very challenging problems. The first is the ability to rapidly search data collections at greater scale than any other offering in the market. The second is to allow search formulation and analysis in natural language. This means that no longer is an elite class of analysts required in order to generate meaningful results, thus reducing the personnel training and skills shortages that plague alternative solutions and put timely discovery at risk. The explosion of ‘Big Data’ is real and valuable findings are buried in vast collections for both enterprises and governments. Chiliad has the opportunity to integrate its innovative, massively scalable solutions with emerging open source software to build customized solutions for the largest-scale clients.”
Businessweek described the company in this way:
Chiliad, Inc. provides data analysis solutions for various clouds, agencies, departments, and other stovepipes. The company offers Discovery/Alert, a platform that enables investigators, business analysts, and knowledge workers to securely reach, find, analyze, and continuously stay on top of big data—whether structured or unstructured, and classified or unclassified. Its software solutions include Iterative Discovery cycle that allows analysts and researchers to reach various content silos, find what matters, analyze it to find meaning from the information relationships presented and continuously monitor changes; and Architecture, a virtual consolidated data center that enables multidimensional analysis and ranking. It serves government/intelligence, law enforcement, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, and other markets. Chiliad, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.
I have highlighted the buzzwords that were designed to generate sales leads and revenue. I can only assume that the verbiage and the Attensity management touch fell short of the mark. How many of the “analytics” and “business intelligence” companies will follow Chiliad’s path? Good question but I keep asking it.
Stephen E Arnold, October 12, 2014
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